Transparent Background

Turn a flat background colour transparent, with a soft edge, without uploading the image.

Runs on your deviceImagesWorkingNo account needed

What this tool does

Transparent Background compares every pixel against a background colour and, where the two are close enough, writes zero into the alpha channel. The picture is otherwise left as it was, and the result is saved as PNG, WebP or AVIF, because those are the formats that can carry transparency at all. Only PNG hands the pixels back intact: this page carries no quality slider, so WebP and AVIF go through a lossy re-encode fixed at 85 per cent, and a hard edge or a flat area of tone will show that.

Two modes decide which pixels are considered. The flood fill starts at the four corners and spreads outward through touching pixels, but it measures each one against the corner shades themselves rather than against the neighbour it arrived from — so a backdrop that drifts into a gradient stops being cleared at the point where the drift passes the tolerance. Because the fill only travels through connected pixels, paper showing through the counter of a letter, or the gap between a mug and its handle, survives untouched. The colour key ignores connectivity and clears every match in the frame, enclosed areas included. Since the corners double as the reference colours, an image whose subject runs into a corner will have part of that subject read as background.

This is a colour key, not subject detection. Nothing here is looking for a person or a product, so it handles studio white, a flat brand colour, a logo, a chart or a screenshot, and it will not separate someone photographed against a wall, a lawn or a street. The second limit is fringing. Only the alpha channel is touched, never the colour beneath it, and anti-aliased edge pixels are a blend of the subject with the background that used to be there — so a cut-out taken from white keeps a pale rim that shows the moment you place it on a dark page. Soft edge fades those pixels out; it does not repaint them.

How to use it

  1. Add your images. JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP and SVG decode here; HEIC and TIFF do not, because browsers ship no decoder for them. Several files can be queued and each is processed separately with the same settings, though one file that matches nothing ends the whole run and the images already finished are lost with it.
  2. Choose which pixels to clear. The background touching the edges fills inward from the four corners. Every pixel of one colour keys out matches anywhere in the frame, including areas the subject encloses.
  3. Name the background colour. Needed only in colour mode, where a swatch and a hex box sit side by side. Nothing on the page samples a colour off the picture itself, so if you are unsure of the exact shade, read it out with Image Color Picker first.
  4. Set the tolerance. Zero demands an exact match. Ten per cent, the default, suits a clean PNG; a JPEG background is never perfectly flat and usually wants twenty or more before it clears fully.
  5. Soften the edge and pick a format. Soft edge fades pixels that land just past the tolerance instead of cutting them off abruptly. It starts at six per cent and reaches as far as forty. PNG, WebP and AVIF are the only outputs offered, because JPG has no alpha channel to write into.

Processing & privacy

Runs on your device. Your file is processed directly in this browser.

Common use cases

A product shot on a white sweep

Clear the backdrop once and the same photo drops onto a coloured listing page, a slide or a printed sheet without a white box around it.

A logo that only exists as a JPG

Knock out the white the encoder baked in, and the mark can sit on a dark header instead of floating inside a rectangle.

Charts and screenshots for a deck

Interface chrome and chart canvases are usually one flat grey or white, which is precisely the case a colour key handles cleanly.

A flat studio colour behind a subject

Green, blue or grey backdrops key out the same way white does — pick the colour, then raise the tolerance until the lighting gradient across it is covered.

Questions

Is my image uploaded?
No. Decoding, the pixel work and re-encoding all happen in this browser tab on a canvas. The file goes nowhere, and the tool still works with the network switched off.
Can it cut a person out of an ordinary photo?
No, and that is the real limit of the method. It matches colours, so it needs a background that is one colour. A subject standing in front of a room, a hedge or a street has no single background colour to match, and no tolerance setting will separate them.
Why is there a pale outline around my subject?
Edge pixels are a blend of the subject and whatever was behind it, and only the alpha channel is changed — the colour underneath stays as it was. A cut-out lifted from white therefore keeps a light rim once it sits on something dark. Raising soft edge fades that rim rather than recolouring it, and cropping a pixel tighter helps as well.
It says nothing matched. What now?
The job is refused rather than handing back a file that looks unchanged. Raise the tolerance, or switch to the colour mode and give the exact hex, which is the usual fix when what you set out to remove white turns out to be off-white or a faint gradient.
Why can I not save as JPG?
JPG has no alpha channel, so it would flatten the transparency straight back to a solid colour. PNG is lossless and the safe choice; WebP and AVIF come out smaller because they re-encode lossily, and AVIF writes only on recent browsers — where it cannot, the tool says so rather than quietly handing you another format.
What happens to an animated GIF?
Only the first frame is decoded, so the output is a single still image and the animation is not carried through.
Does it keep transparency the image already has?
Yes. Pixels that are already fully transparent are skipped, so an existing cut-out is left alone and only opaque background pixels are cleared. In corner mode that cuts both ways: a corner which is already transparent gives the fill nothing to spread from, so no clearing starts there at all.

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