Photo background remover
Portraits are the hardest thing to cut out well, because hair does not have an edge. This page is set up for that.
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A quality setting that earns its wait
Start on Balanced, which handles most portraits. If the hairline comes out soft, switch to High and run again — it is a bigger model and a slower first run, and it is where hair and fur actually improve.
Pick one person in a group
Draw the focus box around the individual you want and the export contains only that region.
Faces stay on your device
Photos of people are exactly the files worth not uploading. Processing happens locally, so no copy is transmitted.
How to cut a person out of a photo
- 1
Load the photo
Straight from the camera roll on a phone, or dragged in on a computer.
- 2
Box the subject
Include the whole head and shoulders plus a margin. Cutting the box through the hair is the most common cause of a poor edge.
- 3
Run it, then judge the hairline
Balanced is enough for most photos. Switch to High and run again for anything with flyaway hair, fur or a fuzzy jumper — slower, and noticeably better at fringes.
- 4
Brush the edges
Restore hair the model trimmed, erase background it kept. Small strokes, then undo if a stroke goes wrong.
Why hair is the hard part
A strand of hair is thinner than a pixel in most photographs. The pixel it lands in is part hair and part background, so the honest answer for that pixel is partial transparency rather than in-or-out.
Good cutouts get this approximately right and leave a soft fringe. Bad ones produce either a bald silhouette or a halo of the original background colour. If you see a halo, erase a pixel or two along the edge — the halo lives in the original photo, not in the cutout.
Group photos and picking one person
An automatic model chooses whatever it finds most salient, which in a group is usually whoever is largest or most central. That is a guess, and often the wrong one.
The focus box removes the guesswork. Draw it around one person, with visible background on each side, and the model has both the target and the contrast it needs.
Photos where it will struggle
Dark hair against a dark background, motion blur, heavy backlighting where the subject is a silhouette, and dense crowds where people overlap.
In those cases a cutout can still be a starting point, but expect to spend a minute with the brushes rather than accepting the first pass.
Common jobs this handles
Profile pictures
Lift yourself off a distracting background and drop onto a plain colour.
Team pages
Consistent headshots from photos taken in different rooms.
Pet photos
Fur benefits from the same high-quality setting as hair.
Frequently asked questions
Are photos of people uploaded to a server?
No. The model runs in your browser and the image data stays on your device. That is the main reason this tool exists in the form it does.
How do I cut out one person from a group photo?
Draw the focus box around that person, leaving a margin of background on each side, then run it. The export covers only that region.
The hair looks chopped off. What can I do?
Switch to High quality and run again, then use the Restore brush along the hairline to paint the original pixels back. Restore only affects the area under the brush.
Can I keep a shadow under the subject?
Not automatically — shadows are read as background. You can restore part of the shadow with the brush, though the result depends on the shadow being distinct in the original.
Go deeper
How AI removal works
What a segmentation model actually does to your image, why it needs context around the subject, and the kinds of pictures it cannot handle at all.
How to remove a background
A practical walkthrough for removing an image background: what to select, which quality setting to use, how to fix edges, and which format to export.