Make a background transparent

How to make a background transparent

1. Add your pictures. Drop one or many anywhere on the page, paste one, or click the box to choose files. Phone photos, including iPhone HEIC, work too.
2. Look at the preview. The background is already see-through, shown as a checkerboard. The Background row says which color was found, for example #ffffff for white. If the wrong color was found, click the picture on the color you want to remove.
3. Adjust if you need to. Color range decides how close to the background color a pixel must be to go. Edge softness cleans the line where the subject meets the background. Preview on lets you check the result on white, black, red or blue.
4. Press Make it transparent, then download each file, or all of them as a ZIP. The files are PNG (the default) or WebP, because JPEG cannot hold see-through pixels.

Your original files are never changed. Each result is named after its picture with -transparent added and keeps the picture's own size.

When this works, and when to use the background remover

This tool removes one color: whatever the background is made of, as long as it is the same color all around the subject. That is exactly what a logo, an icon, a signature on a scan, clip art and a product on a white studio sheet have. It cannot tell a person from a lawn, because to it both are just colors.

The settings

• Background. By default the most common color along the picture's edge (two pixels deep) is used. That finds white, cream paper, a flat blue and so on. Click the picture to use the color under the pointer instead, and press Automatic to go back. The color you click applies to every picture in the list.
• Color range (0 to 100, starting at 15). A pixel counts as background when none of its red, green or blue values differs from the background color by more than the range allows: 0 means only exactly that color, and 100 means up to 128 levels of difference out of 255. A flat PNG needs almost no range. A JPEG needs some, because compression adds faint noise around shapes: on our test logo saved as a JPEG at quality 85, a range of 0 left 5.9 percent of the true background visible as specks, and a range of 40 left 0.18 percent.
• Edge softness (0 to 100, starting at 30). Where the background touches the subject, edge pixels are a mix of both colors. This sets the width of the band along the edge that is cleaned: a share of the picture's shorter side, so 30 on a 1,000-pixel picture is 2 pixels, and 100 is 6. 0 is a hard cut with no cleaning.
• Keep that color inside the picture. Unchecked, the background color goes everywhere it appears, which is right for a logo: the hole inside an o or an a becomes see-through. Checked, only the background connected to the picture's border goes, so a white eye, a white shirt or the white inside a ring stays solid.
• Preview on. Only changes what you look at, so it never clears finished files. Checking a logo on black is the quickest way to spot a leftover pale edge.

Clean edges, and what that is worth

The simple way to make a background transparent is to switch off every pixel close to the background color. That leaves the edge pixels, which are half background, half subject: they look fine on white and show as a pale halo on any dark page. This tool un-mixes them instead. For each edge pixel it finds the solid color of the subject next to it, gives the pixel that color, and sets only as much see-through-ness as the mix needs.

We measured this on a logo with text, circles, a star and thin lines, whose true see-through-ness is known, placed on white, then placed on red, black and blue backgrounds and compared with the ideal result. The error is the average difference per color value, out of 255 (lower is better), with the default settings:

The see-through-ness itself (the alpha channel) was off by 0.02, 0.31 and 0.73 out of 255 on average in the three rows. The JPEG rows are worse because compression has already damaged the edges before this tool sees the picture.

What it cannot do

• A shadow is not the background. A product photo with a soft shadow keeps the shadow as a pale gray patch. In our apple test, the shadow stayed at the default range, and raising the range to 40 and 70 started to punch holes in the shiny highlight on the apple instead. If you want the shadow gone, keep a low range and clean it in a photo editor, or take the photo without one.
• Subject colors close to the background. A pale yellow logo on white may lose its lightest areas, because from the tool's side they are background colors. Raise the range as little as you can, and check on black.
• Photos with real backgrounds are not for this tool (see the table above).
• Very low-contrast edges cannot be separated from the background, so they stay as they are.
• Pictures over 50 megapixels are refused with a message, because the work needs about 14 bytes of memory per pixel. Phone cameras are well under that.

Saving and limits

• PNG or WebP. PNG is lossless and works everywhere. WebP is smaller and has a Quality slider. JPEG is not offered, because it cannot be see-through: our guide on PNG, JPG and WebP explains the difference.
• Size. Each result has the same width and height as its picture. A 12-megapixel picture (4,000 × 3,000 pixels) took about 0.6 seconds from the press of the button to a saved PNG, measured on a busy Apple M1 Max.
• Metadata, such as camera data and location, is not copied to the result.
• Many pictures at once. The settings apply to all of them, and each picture's background color is found on its own unless you click one.

Ideas for using it

• Your own logo on a dark website, a slide, a video or a printed shirt, saved as a PNG.
• Your own signature from a clean scan, to place on documents.
• Product photos for a shop page with a colored background.
• Stickers and cut-outs: make a drawing or a line drawing from a photo, then make its white paper see-through.
• Sprites and icons drawn on a flat color.

How it works

1. The background color is the most common color along the picture's border, or the one you clicked.
2. A pixel is background when its red, green and blue are each within the range of that color. With Keep that color inside the picture checked, only pixels connected to the border by background pixels count.
3. Background pixels become fully see-through.
4. Pixels within the edge-softness distance of the see-through area are un-mixed: the strongest nearby non-background color is taken as the subject color, and each pixel's see-through-ness is how much of that color it contains, worked out from how far the pixel lies between the background color and the subject color. The pixel then takes the subject color. Pixels further inside the subject are not touched.

It is not an AI model: it only separates colors, so it is fast, runs everywhere and has nothing to download. We checked the result against drawn shapes whose true see-through-ness was known (above) and against real photographs of products on white.

Privacy

• The background is removed inside this tab. There is no model to download, and your files on disk are never changed or deleted.
• For what this site collects and keeps, see our privacy policy.