Background eraser: AI first, then your brush

This background eraser does the heavy lifting for you. When you open a photo, an AI model running in your browser erases most of the background in one pass, and you finish the job with an erase and restore brush that has adjustable size and softness, plus undo and redo. If you'd rather work entirely by hand, switch the AI off and erase on the original photo. It's free, the download is a transparent PNG at full size, and the photo never leaves your device.

The controls

The Refine panel holds everything you need:

• View, Erase, Restore, Pick color. View lets you look without changing anything. Erase makes what you paint over transparent. Restore paints the original photo back, even where the AI took it away. Pick color erases a color you click, wherever it appears.
• Brush size, from 4 to 160 pixels. The size is measured on your screen, not in the photo, so the same setting always covers the same area of the preview; with a mouse or pen, a circle shows exactly where it will land.
• Softness, from 0 to 100%, starting at 35%. It decides how gradually the brush fades at its rim.
• Undo and Redo, one brush stroke at a time.
• Remove a color and Tolerance, for flat areas of one color: the tolerance sets how close a shade must be to count.
• Start from the AI cutout. Ticked, you work on the AI's result; unticked, the whole photo comes back for erasing by hand.

The Compare button adds a before/after slider over the picture, and picking up the brush switches it off again, so you can check and fix in turns.

AI first, then the brush

Erasing a background stroke by stroke is slow because most of the outline is easy but long. The AI takes care of those long stretches in one pass, a few seconds on a recent computer, so your brush time goes to the few places where the photo is genuinely unclear:

• Things touching the subject: a bag on a shoulder, the chair someone sits on, a hand resting on a table.
• Colors that match: a black jacket against a dark doorway, a beige dog on a beige sofa.
• A second subject: half a person at the edge of the frame, a pet wandering into the shot.

Decide what belongs to your picture, then Erase what doesn't and Restore what does. The first run of the AI downloads its model, about 50 MB, which your browser keeps for later visits.

Erasing by hand

Untick Start from the AI cutout when the AI's idea of the subject isn't yours: you want to keep a sign behind the person, or only one of several objects, or you're working on a drawing rather than a photo. The full picture returns and nothing is erased until you paint. Any brush strokes you made before switching stay in place.

Work from coarse to fine. Clear big, open areas with a large brush first, take out a flat wall or a clear sky in one go with Pick color, then shrink the brush for the outline. For a picture on plain white, the white background remover does the color step for you. Hard objects, such as a phone, a box or a piece of furniture, want low softness and short, careful strokes along the edge; if a stroke slips, undo it rather than painting over it.

Tips for hair, holes and shadows

• Hair and fur. Raise the softness and brush along the outside of the hair, not across it, so the ends fade out instead of stopping at a cut line. If a strand vanishes, paint over it with Restore and a small, soft brush to bring it back from the original photo.
• Holes. Background seen through the subject often stays behind: the gap between a hand on a hip and the waist, the loop of a handbag strap, the space inside a pair of scissors' handles. Erase it with a small brush, or, when the background there is one flat color, click it with Pick color.
• Shadows. A shadow on the floor usually leaves with the background, but the dark patch right under someone's feet or a product can stay attached to the subject. Erase it with a soft brush so the base doesn't end in a hard line. The eraser won't create a new shadow, so if the picture needs one, add it in a design app.
• See-through things. Glass, veils and smoke are the hardest cases for any remover, because the background really does show through them. The brush can't set an exact level of see-through, so decide whether each area should stay or go, and let the soft rim of a large brush handle the places where one fades into the other.

Check before you download

Drag the before/after slider slowly along the outline, paying most attention to the places you painted. A leftover that the checkerboard hides becomes obvious once a solid color sits behind the picture, so try one of the background swatches for a moment, then go back to transparent for the PNG. The step-by-step guide to making a background transparent covers that check in detail, along with the saving mistakes that quietly undo transparency, and photo tips for people, pets, products and food help you start from a picture that cuts out cleanly.