Background eraser: AI first, then your brush

This background eraser does the heavy lifting for you. When you open a photo, an AI model 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. Brush edits stay in the open tab. Preview PNG downloads up to 0.25 megapixels are free; one image credit unlocks Max above that size.

The controls

Open Cutout in the toolbar for the Refine controls:

• 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; while it's selected, the removed parts show faintly so you can see what you're bringing back. 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.
• Smart brush. Each stroke changes only colors close to the one under the brush's center where the stroke starts. Start an Erase stroke on the leftover background and run it along the edge: the background goes and the subject stays. It compares colors, so where the subject and background are the same shade, switch it off.
• Undo and Redo, for recent brush edits. A long stroke may use several undo steps.
• Check edges. Choose Actual pixels to inspect the original pixel size, or magnify the fitted preview up to 400%. Use the view sliders or Pan preview to move around, then Fit image to see the whole picture. White and Black are temporary backdrops for spotting fringes; they leave your download's background, size and framing unchanged.
• Remove a color and Tolerance, for flat areas of one color: the tolerance sets how close a shade must be to count.
• Edge finish. Try Shrink edge at 1 pixel for a thin fringe. It can remove fine hair, so inspect before increasing it. Color cleanup controls how strongly the automatic cutout corrects edge colors; lower it if colors look wrong. Reset edge finish keeps your brush edits.
• 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, 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. Check the result on both light and dark preview backdrops before downloading.

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. Against a plain background, Smart brush helps: start each stroke on the background and it leaves hair of a different color alone. 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. For a new conventional shadow, enable Add a shadow, choose a drop shadow or a floor shadow under the base, and adjust its color, opacity, softness and position. It follows your corrected cutout and updates when you erase, restore or undo.
• 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. Open Cutout, then Check edges, and try White and Black to spot leftovers hidden by the checkerboard. These preview-only colors never enter the download; opening Download shows your actual background again. 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.