Remove Background

What is the Remove Background tool?

This tool automatically detects the main subject in a photo — a person, a product, an animal, or most everyday objects — and removes everything behind it, producing a transparent PNG. It's the same kind of cutout used for profile pictures, product photos on a white or transparent background, or preparing an image to place on a new background.

How to use it

1. Choose a photo with a reasonably distinct subject.
2. The first time you use this tool, your browser downloads an on-device AI model (about 61MB) — after that first download, it's cached and every future use skips the download. Processing itself can still take up to 30 seconds, since the model runs entirely on your device's own processor.
3. Click Download PNG once the background has been removed.

How it works, and why it's different from our other tools

Unlike the other image tools on this site, which use simple pixel math, this one runs a real AI saliency-detection model (IS-Net, an open-source general-purpose dichotomous image segmentation model, via ONNX Runtime) directly in your browser using WebAssembly. It's considerably heavier to load and slower to run than our other tools because of that, but it still runs entirely on your device — your photo is never uploaded to a server, and nothing is sent anywhere for processing.

When results may be imperfect

This is a general-purpose subject detector, not a model trained for one specific category, so it can occasionally struggle with low-contrast subjects, cluttered backgrounds, or multiple competing subjects in the same frame. Fine detail like flyaway hair, fur, or motion blur at the edges can also be imperfectly captured, as with any automatic background removal — for a trickier photo, cropping tightly to the subject first often improves the result.