How to cut out a background and save a transparent PNG
Drop in a photo and a background-free PNG comes back within seconds. There is nothing to configure. If the cut is not what you wanted, press “Try the other cut” to see the second result and save whichever looks better. Everything happens inside your browser tab, and the photo is never uploaded.
Why there are two results
There is more than one way to separate a subject from its background. A model trained on people keeps flyaway hair and raised arms intact, but when the photo has no person in it, it misses the subject entirely and hands back a nearly empty image. A general-purpose model trained on any salient object handles cars, potted plants and drinking glasses reliably, but it tends to break thin parts such as an outstretched arm.
So this tool runs both and compares how much each one kept. When the portrait model keeps far too little, it has lost the subject, and the general result is shown instead. The portrait model does not fail by cutting sloppily — it fails by missing the subject altogether, so the gap between the two results is wide and the automatic pick is usually right.
Photos that work, and photos that fight back
Portraits, ID photos, product shots, animals and illustrations usually come out clean. The sharper the contrast between subject and background, the more accurate the edge.
Three cases are genuinely hard. Translucent objects such as a glass or a plastic bag show whatever is behind them, so where the subject ends is not even well defined. When subject and background are the same colour, there is no cue to find an edge. Crowded or cropped compositions can leave part of the subject behind. In these cases, look at the other cut too — the two models fail in different places, so one of them often rescues the shot.
If transparency disappears after saving
An erased background is not a colour, it is transparency. Only PNG and WebP can carry it; JPEG cannot. If you open the result in another tool and re-save it as JPEG, every transparent pixel is filled with black or white. When a marketplace or a form only accepts JPEG, put your chosen background colour behind the subject first, then export to JPEG.
Some chat apps re-compress images to JPEG as they send them. If transparency has to survive, send the file as an attachment rather than as an inline image.
Why the first image takes longer
The first run also downloads the models that decide what counts as background. The two of them come to about 17 MB, and once they are cached by the browser, later photos start immediately. The photo itself never travels anywhere: the download is the model, and nothing is uploaded.
Drop in several files and they are processed one after another. As with the other image tools here, the result carries no EXIF data such as GPS location or camera model.