Remove background Beta
Separates a person from whatever is behind them, then saves a full-size PNG on a transparent, white or coloured background. The photo is never uploaded — everything runs in this browser tab.
Background removal editor
Sample photo
The first run downloads about 21MB of model and runtime files from this site.
Check the photo, then press Remove background.
Where it gets things wrong — why this is still beta
The model looks at your photo as a 256 by 256 grid. It shrinks the picture down to that size, decides person or background for each cell, then stretches the result back up over the full-size photo. On a 1,200×900 photo one cell covers about 4.7px across and 3.5px down. Anything thinner than that — a strand of hair, the gap between two fingers, the arm of a pair of glasses — gets averaged away inside a single cell. Faces and shoulders come out clean; hair ends up with a soft, smeared edge for the same reason.
Counting the mask values on the park portrait sample, 3.5% of the cells came back neither clearly person nor clearly background (measured 2026-08-29 with the same model this tool uses, run the same way). Almost all of that 3.5% sits along hair and the edges of clothing, which is exactly where you should zoom in before saving.
Then there is what the model never learned. It was trained on photos of people, so a product shot, a pet or a landscape gives it nothing to hold on to — it does not know what to keep. Anything you can see through, a glass or a thin fabric, comes back half person and half background, so it stays partly see-through. Clothing close in colour to the wall behind it can leave with the wall. Two people overlapping, or one person small in a wide frame, also come out badly. For photos like that, retaking the shot or picking a different one is faster than fighting the result.
What the first run downloads, and how long it takes
The first time you press Remove background, two files come down. The model is 6.6MB (6,632,188 bytes) and the code that runs it is 14MB (13,961,845 bytes) — about 21MB together. Both are served from this site, so removing a background does not connect you to another company's server. Ads on the page are a separate request. Once your browser has the two files cached, later runs skip the download.
That download is most of the wait. The calculation itself took 0.2 seconds per photo on the computer this page was written on (Chrome, 2026-08-29, a 1,200×900 photo). What you see depends on your device, the photo and your connection. A second photo in the same tab reuses the model that is already loaded.
Before the model is used, the downloaded file is checked against a fingerprint recorded in advance. If it does not match, nothing runs.
What to do with the PNG you download
The result is a PNG at the same pixel size as the photo you opened. With the transparent background selected, everything except the person is empty, so the file sits on top of whatever is behind it. That is the version you want for a slide with the person over a coloured panel, for a marketplace listing where the room behind the item is a distraction, or for an About or team page where every headshot needs the same background. Pick white or a colour instead and the tool paints it in for you, which is usually enough for a résumé photo or a badge picture.
Full-size PNGs are big — a 1,200×900 result lands around 1.4 to 1.8MB. If the site you are uploading to has a size limit, send it through JPG convert or Compress images first. One thing to know before you do: JPG has no transparency, and our converter fills those empty areas with white. If you need the see-through parts kept, keep the PNG.
Do not use this for a passport or ID photo. Those rules are judged on hair edges and shadows, and that is the weakest part of this tool. Follow the photo requirements published by whoever issues the document instead.
Where people get caught out
The cut-out is clean everywhere
It is clean where the edge is thick. Jawline, shoulders and arms hold up. Hair, glasses frames and fingers held apart are drawn from a mask that was only 256 cells wide, so they arrive soft or partly missing. Switch to Result, zoom in on the head, and look before you download.
Saving the PNG as a JPG keeps the transparency
JPG cannot hold transparency at all. Convert a transparent PNG to JPG here and the empty areas are filled with white. That is fine if white is what you wanted; it is a surprise if you were planning to drop the person onto a dark slide.
The download replaces my photo
It is a new file next to the old one. Your original is still on the device untouched, and the new one has -background-removed at the end of its name. Check which one you are attaching when you send it. The saved file also carries none of the original's metadata — no capture location, no camera model — because the image is redrawn onto a canvas in the browser and exported from there.