Make a picture background transparent

How to use it

1. Press "Choose pictures" or drop them here. Pick several at once if you like (see the preview of each with its "Preview this picture" button).
2. Leave the background colour on automatic, click the background on the original picture, or type a colour code such as #ffffff.
3. Look at the result on the checkerboard. Adjust "Closeness of colour" and "Softness of the edge" until the edge is clean; you can also look at it on white, black or any colour.
4. Press "Remove the background and save as PNG". The PNG file goes to your downloads; several pictures come as one zip.

How the two ways differ

The pictures below are a ring with a hole on a one-colour background, made for real by this tool on this page.

• From the edge (the default) starts at the edge of the picture and removes only the areas of a colour close to the background that run on from there. The same colour trapped inside the object, such as the whites of eyes, the hole of an O or a white patch on a shirt, stays. Best for product photos, people and drawings.
• The whole picture removes every spot of a close colour, wherever it is. Best for logos, lettering and line art with holes (an O, A or B) that should be see-through too. But if part of the object has a colour near the background, that part goes as well.

Getting a good result

"Close" is measured the way the eye sees colour (the distance in the Lab colour space), not as raw RGB numbers, so it works the same for a white, a black or a coloured background. To get a good result: 1) get the background colour right (clicking the background on the picture is the most exact way); 2) raise the closeness until the remaining specks of background are gone; 3) set the softness so that the edge is smooth, not jagged.

Your pictures never leave your device

This tool opens the pictures from your device, works on them in your browser's memory and saves new files straight back to your device. Nothing is uploaded to freesabai's servers or anyone else's, and no picture or file name is kept: close the page and it is all gone. The site only counts how many times this page is opened and how many times a result is saved, never a file name, size or content, and you can switch the counting off at the bottom of the page (see the privacy policy).

Limits, and good to know

• A JPG is compressed, so an area that looks like one flat colour usually has slight unevenness and specks round the edge of the object. If specks of background remain, raise "Closeness of colour"; if it starts to eat into the object, lower it.
• An object with a colour close to the background (a white shirt on a white background) becomes see-through too. The tool works from colour and does not know what the object is. Try "From the edge inwards", or lower the closeness.
• A background with a gradient, shadows, a pattern or several colours gives poor results. This is not an AI background remover: it suits a plain one-colour background only. For a complicated background (a person in an outdoor scene, say) use an AI background-removal service or the object-selection tools of a photo editor.
• A cut-out edge looks best on a background close to the original colour. If you place it on something very different and see a faint line round the object, raise "Closeness of colour" a little so it reaches past the edge.
• The picture is drawn again as a new file, so the hidden data in it (EXIF), such as the GPS place, camera and date, does not go into the PNG, and the way up is applied first.
• An animated GIF or WebP becomes a still picture, its first frame only.
• A PNG with transparency is several times bigger than the JPG it came from. A very large picture on a phone (over about 16 million pixels) is brought down to what the device can hold as it is opened; for the full original size, use a computer.

See also

JPG to PNG with a transparent background · Convert image

Report a problem or suggest an idea

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