Remove a plain white or solid background by colour. Click to pick, preview on a checkerboard, on your device.
This tool makes a plain background transparent by colour. It is not an AI cut-out. It takes the background colour, either the colour shared by the corners of the picture or the one you click, and makes every pixel close to that colour see-through. Closeness is the straight-line distance between two colours in red, green and blue, not in Lab. White is 255, 255, 255. A pale grey of 235, 235, 235 is about 35 steps away, and a mid grey of 200, 200, 200 is about 95. The Tolerance slider is that distance as a percentage of the longest possible one, black to white, about 442. At the default of 10 the limit is about 44, so the pale grey goes and the mid grey stays.
With Edges only, a pixel is removed only if it matches the colour and is joined to the border of the picture through other matching pixels. This is a flood fill that starts at the edges. It leaves a white area inside the subject alone: the hole in a letter O, the white of an eye, a white label on a bottle. With Every match, all matching pixels go, including those. Use Edges only for logos and products on white, and Every match when the background shows through gaps, such as between the strokes of a signature or inside a chain-link shape. Soft edge fades the first 1 to 3 pixels next to the removed area, which hides the jagged line a hard cut leaves around curved shapes.
It works on pictures with one flat background: logos, signatures on white paper, product shots on a white sweep, scans, icons and screenshots. It fails on busy photos. A person in front of a sky or a street has no single background colour, so a colour rule either removes parts of the subject or leaves most of the background. It also cannot separate a subject from a background of nearly the same colour, such as a white shirt on a white wall, and a soft shadow on the backdrop is a different colour from the backdrop, so it stays unless you raise the tolerance enough to take it, which then eats into light parts of the subject. Edge pixels that blended the subject with the old background can leave a faint halo; a small Soft edge or a slightly higher tolerance reduces it.
The result is saved as a PNG, which keeps transparency without loss, or as a WebP at quality 92, which also keeps it and is usually smaller. JPEG cannot hold transparency, so a JPEG you add comes out as PNG or WebP. Colours of the kept pixels are not changed, only their opacity. Pictures over 16 megapixels are made smaller first, because the flood fill needs a few bytes of memory per pixel, and the result shows both sizes. The photo details stored in the original, such as location, are not copied. Up to 50 images can be done at once with the same settings. A picked colour applies to the whole batch, while the corner colour is found separately for each image.
Add the image, leave the colour on the corners, check the checkerboard preview, then press Make 1 image transparent and download the PNG. A pure white background is 255, 255, 255 and the default tolerance of 10 also removes off-white such as 245, 245, 245. If the preview still shows white patches, raise the tolerance a few steps.
The mode is Edges only, which removes the colour only where it connects to the border of the picture. A white area enclosed by the subject, such as the hole in a letter O, is not connected, so it stays. Switch Remove to Every match to take those areas too.
Not reliably. This is a colour rule, not an AI cut-out, so it needs one flat background colour. A portrait against a blue studio backdrop can work with the backdrop picked and a low tolerance. A photo taken outdoors usually cannot, because the background has many colours.
Photograph or scan the signature on white paper, add the image, and use Every match so the gaps inside the strokes are cleared too. Start at 20 and raise it until paper grain and shadow clear while the ink stays solid. Save as PNG and place it over a document.
PNG and WebP keep it. JPEG has no alpha channel, so it would turn the transparent area back into a solid colour, usually black or white. A JPEG you add is saved as PNG by default, and WebP is the smaller option at quality 92.
No. The colour matching runs on a canvas inside this tab, so no server receives your picture. The page counts visits with Google Analytics using rough groups such as 1 to 10 MB, never a file name or an image. Your tolerance, mode and format are remembered on this device; the picked colour is not.