What this does
Turns one background colour in an image transparent and exports a PNG with a proper alpha channel. It is the classic chroma-key approach: pick the colour you want gone, set how far a pixel may stray from that colour before it is kept, and every matching pixel becomes see-through.
It works best when the background is close to a single flat colour: product shots on a white or grey sweep, logos on a coloured card, app screenshots on a solid backdrop, clip art, and scanned line drawings. Because the rule is purely about colour, it runs instantly on any device and needs no model download.
How do I remove a white background from an image?
- Load the image. The colour swatch defaults to white, which is what most product and logo backgrounds are.
- If the background is not pure white, press Pick from image and click a background pixel. The swatch updates to that exact colour.
- Raise tolerance until the background disappears on the checkerboard preview. Start around 60; JPEG backgrounds usually need more than PNG ones because compression adds noise.
- Add a little edge feather to blend the boundary so the cutout does not look jagged. Then download the PNG.
How is this different from the AI background remover?
This tool decides pixel by pixel, based only on colour distance from the one you picked. That is fast, predictable, and needs nothing downloaded, but it cannot tell a subject from a background that shares its colours: a white shirt on a white sweep will get holes, and an outdoor portrait with sky, trees, and pavement behind it is out of reach. For those, the AI background remover runs a segmentation model locally in your browser. It downloads about 44 MB the first time and is slower, but it understands what the subject is. Rule of thumb: flat studio background, use this tool; anything else, use the AI one.
How do I get clean edges?
Two controls do the work. Tolerance sets how different from the chosen colour a pixel can be and still count as background; too low leaves a halo of off-white pixels around the subject, too high starts eating into the subject wherever its colour comes close to the background's. Feather softens the cutoff by giving pixels near the threshold partial transparency instead of a hard yes or no, which hides anti-aliasing and JPEG artefacts along the silhouette. Nudge tolerance up until the background is gone, then add just enough feather that the edge stops looking stair-stepped.
Why does the output have to be PNG?
Transparency needs an alpha channel, and among the formats browsers can write, PNG is the one every other application accepts with transparency intact. JPG has no alpha at all, so exporting to it would flatten the cutout onto a solid colour and undo the work. If you need a smaller transparent file for the web, convert the PNG to WebP afterwards with the PNG to WebP converter.