How to remove a background in Paint

To remove a background in Paint, open the picture and click Remove background in the toolbar. Paint finds the subject, removes everything around it and leaves a transparent area in its place. Save the result as a PNG to keep that transparency. This works in the Paint app on Windows 11, which gained background removal, layers and transparent PNG support in updates Microsoft began rolling out in September 2023.

Remove the background from the whole picture

1. Open the picture in Paint, or copy it from another app and paste it onto the canvas.
2. Click Remove background in the toolbar.
3. Look at the result. The subject stays, and the area around it becomes transparent.

Microsoft describes the result as "a smooth cutout of the subject". It works best when the subject is clear and stands out from its surroundings: a person, a pet or a product in the foreground of a photo.

If you don't see the button, check that Paint is up to date; the feature reached Windows Insiders first.

Remove the background from part of a picture

Background removal can also work inside a selection. Choose the rectangle select tool, draw a rectangle around the part of the picture you want, then click Remove background. Paint looks for a subject inside the rectangle and removes the background around it there, leaving the rest of the canvas as it was.

This helps with a picture that holds several subjects, or a screenshot where only one element should keep its surroundings removed.

Clean up the edges and keep the transparency

Paint's background removal is one click with no settings, so check the edges afterwards. Since the layers and transparency update, the Eraser truly erases: the erased area becomes transparent instead of turning white. Use it for any leftover patch of background.

On a single layer, a checkerboard pattern shows which parts are transparent. The checkerboard is not part of the picture; it only marks empty areas.

To keep those empty areas, save the picture as a PNG. Paint can open and save transparent PNGs, but formats such as JPG cannot store transparency, so a cutout saved as JPG gets a solid background again. The guide to what a transparent background is explains which formats keep it.

Put the cutout on a new background with layers

Paint's Layers button opens a panel beside the canvas where you can add, remove, reorder, show, hide, duplicate and merge layers. To place your cutout on a new background, add a layer, move it below the cutout, and fill it with a color or paste another picture into it. Erasing on one layer reveals the layers underneath, which is useful for small corrections.

When the cutout needs more work

Paint gives you one automatic result plus an eraser with hard edges. That is enough for products and clear portraits, but fine hair, fur and soft edges are harder to fix by hand in Paint.

For those, the background remover on this site runs in your browser with no install. It keeps soft, partly transparent edges, lets you compare before and after with a slider, and has erase and restore brushes with adjustable softness. A preview PNG up to 0.25 megapixels is free without signup or a watermark; larger Max downloads use one credit. You can then open the transparent PNG in Paint to add it to your picture.

Office apps have their own tool for this: the Word and PowerPoint guides cover Remove Background on the Picture Format tab.