Make a background transparent

A file can only be transparent if the format has somewhere to record it. That place is the alpha channel, a fourth number stored alongside red, green and blue that says how opaque each pixel is.

PNG, SVG and WebP have one. JPG does not and never will. So anything saved as JPG has no transparency to recover, whether it is a product shot, a screenshot or a logo. The white around the subject is simply part of the picture, indistinguishable from a white box someone painted in deliberately.

That is what this tool is working around. It cannot read transparency that was never stored, so it reconstructs it by removing the background color. On a clean, even background the result is usually indistinguishable from the real thing, which covers most product photography shot on white, most screenshots and most logos.

Most simple background removers key out every pixel matching the background color. That takes the white around your subject, and also the white inside a letter O, the gaps in a monogram, the window of a building and any pale detail in the image itself. You end up with holes where the picture should be.

This one works differently. It starts at the edges of the image and floods inward, so only background that is actually connected to the outside is removed. Anything enclosed by your artwork is unreachable from the edge, so it stays exactly as it was.

The practical consequence is that pale detail enclosed by your subject is safe, while anything touching the outer edge is not, because from the outside there is no way to tell it apart from the background.

Almost every edge is anti-aliased, meaning the renderer or the camera blends the subject into the background across a pixel or two so the line does not look jagged. Those blended pixels are part background color, which is what makes background removal look cheap when it is done badly.

Cut them all and you get a hard, stepped outline. Keep them all and you get a pale halo of the old background. This tool fades them in proportion instead, so the edge stays soft without carrying a fringe.

The slider controls how aggressive the match is. If parts of your image are vanishing, go left. If a rim of the old background is still visible, go right. There is usually a setting where both problems disappear.

It will not cut a person, a product or a pet out of a photograph. That needs a model that understands what it is looking at, which is a genuinely different kind of software and not something that runs in a browser tab for free.

What it handles well is a flat background of one color connected to the edge of the image. In practice that is product shots taken on a white sweep, screenshots, scanned signatures and stamps, line art, icons, charts, stickers, wordmarks and logos. It covers most of what people actually need a transparent PNG for.

It also cannot invent detail that a low-resolution file never had. If your image is a 400px JPG pulled off an old website, a clean cut-out still leaves you with a 400px image.

Removing a background is a repair. It is worth knowing what the undamaged version looks like.

A logo delivered properly includes vector source files, which have no background at all because they store shapes rather than pixels. From those you export a transparent PNG at any size in seconds, perfectly, every time. No slider, no edge fringe, no guessing.

If you are here because your only copy is a JPG someone emailed you, that is the actual problem, and it is one worth fixing once rather than working around whenever a new use comes up.