Image Background Remover

This background remover cuts the background out of an image and gives you a PNG with transparency. It has two modes: an AI mode made for photos of people, and a colour mode for logos and objects on a plain background. Your photo stays in your browser.

How to use the background remover

1. Choose an image.
2. Pick a mode. Use AI (people) for portraits and selfies. Use Remove a colour for a logo, signature or product on a plain background.
3. In colour mode, click the background in the preview to pick the colour to remove, then move the tolerance slider until the background disappears but your subject stays whole.
4. Check the preview. Transparent areas show as a grey-and-white checkerboard.
5. Optionally fill the background with a solid colour, for example white for an ID-style photo.
6. Download the result as a PNG.

AI mode: made for people

The AI mode uses Google’s MediaPipe selfie segmentation model. According to the MediaPipe Image Segmenter documentation, this model segments the portrait of a person so the background can be replaced or changed. For each pixel it decides between two classes: background or person.

Because it was trained only to find people, it works best on portraits and selfies with one person clearly in view. It is not designed for products, pets, cars or other objects, and on those it may remove too much or too little. Use colour mode for them.

• Best results: one person, head and shoulders or upper body, good light, background not the same colour as hair or clothes.
• Harder cases: loose hair strands, see-through fabric, people far from the camera, or several people overlapping.
• The model works on a small internal image (256 × 256 pixels for the square version), so fine edges such as hair can look soft. Zoom in and check before you use the result.

Remove a colour: for logos and product photos

Colour mode does not use AI. It removes pixels that are close to the colour you clicked. The tolerance decides how close is close enough: a low value removes only that exact shade, a higher one also removes slightly lighter and darker shades, such as a shadow on a white backdrop.

• Ideal for a logo on white, a scanned signature, or a product shot on a plain studio background.
• If parts of your subject vanish, lower the tolerance. If a halo of background is left around the edges, raise it a little.
• It works best when your subject’s colours are clearly different from the background. A white logo on a white background can’t be separated this way.

Why the download is a PNG

JPEG has no transparency, so a cut-out saved as JPEG would get a solid background again. PNG is lossless and supports a full alpha channel, so every pixel can be fully transparent, solid, or partly see-through. The MDN image format guide covers this. PNG files can be large, so for a website you may want to shrink the result with the image compressor, choosing WebP to keep the transparency.

Cut-out images are handy in design work too. See how they fit into layouts in our posts on colour theory for UI designers and image optimization for the web.

Learn more

• Image Compressor
• Image Resizer
• Favicon Generator
• Image Optimisation for the Web: Formats, Sizes and Lazy Loading
• HTML Images

Frequently asked questions

Is my photo uploaded to remove the background?

No. In AI mode the browser downloads the model from Google’s servers, but the photo itself is processed on your device. Colour mode doesn’t use the AI model at all.

Why did the AI remove part of my product?

The AI model only knows the difference between a person and the background. Anything that isn’t a person is treated as background. For products and logos, switch to Remove a colour.

Can I make a passport-style photo with a white background?

You can use AI mode and fill the background with white. Always check the official size and background rules of the authority you are applying to, as this tool doesn’t resize or crop to those rules.

What does the checkerboard mean?

It is how image editors show transparent areas. The checkerboard isn’t part of your image. Those pixels will be see-through in the downloaded PNG.