Remove white background

How to remove a white background

1. Open the image. Tap Choose an image, drop the file on the box, or copy a picture and press Ctrl+V (⌘V on a Mac). A phone photo is turned upright first.
2. Check the colour. The background colour is the most common colour around the border. If it picked the wrong one, tap the background in the picture; in Connected mode, tapping an enclosed area such as the inside of an O clears it as well.
3. Tune the cut. Raise Tolerance until the pale rim or the JPEG noise in the background is gone; lower it if parts of the subject start to vanish. Switch to Everywhere to also clear enclosed areas, such as the inside of an O.
4. For a signature or a drawing on paper, tick Paper photo mode, choose Black or Blue ink, and raise Remove specks to clear dust and paper grain.
5. Look and save. Preview on black or a colour to spot any fringe, drag the handle to compare, tick Trim to content if you want the empty margin gone, and download PNG or WebP at full size.

What it cannot do

• It is not AI. It removes one colour, so it will not cut a person, a pet or a product out of a busy photo. When the border is not one colour, the page says so.
• In Everywhere mode, subject colours that match the background vanish too: the white of an eye, a white shirt, white text inside a logo. Use Connected to keep enclosed whites.
• A shadow on the background is not the background. A soft drop shadow or a gradient backdrop needs a higher tolerance or paper mode, and a strong shadow may stay.
• Animated GIFs are not supported: only the first frame is opened, and the download is a still image.
• Photos over 24 megapixels are scaled down to 24 MP (the page says so and gives the new size). Very large images are slow on older phones.
• Nothing is saved. Close the tab and the result is gone, so download it first.

How the halo removal works

Look closely at the edge of any logo on white and the outermost pixels are pinkish, greyish or pale: they are part logo, part paper. A plain colour key has two bad choices: keep them (the logo gets a white fringe on a dark page) or delete them (jagged stairs). This page treats every pixel within 2 px of the removed area as a mixture. It takes the most solid pixel nearby as the true colour f, sets the opacity from how far the pixel sits from the background toward it, a = (c − bg)·(f − bg) / |f − bg|², and un-mixes the colour: (c − (1 − a)·bg) / a.

A worked pixel: a red logo (255, 0, 0) on white leaves an edge pixel of (255, 128, 128). Its distance from white along the white-to-red line is 127 of 255, so a = 0.50, and un-mixing gives (255, 0, 0). It saves as pure red at 50 % opacity, which looks right on white, black or any colour.

Paper photo mode solves a different problem: a phone photo of white paper is never white. It runs from about 250 near the lamp to 200 in the far corner. The page estimates the paper's brightness on a coarse grid (the brightest value in each block, so ink does not count), smooths it, and divides each pixel by it, so the whole sheet becomes 255 and the ink keeps its darkness before the key is applied.

Questions

How do I remove a white background from an image for free?

Open the image on this page. The background colour is read from the picture's border and every matching pixel connected to the edge goes transparent straight away, shown on a checkerboard. Raise Tolerance if a pale rim is left, then download a PNG at the image's full size. There is no sign-up, no credit counter, no watermark and no downscaled free version, because the work happens in your browser.

How do I make a PNG background transparent?

Open the PNG and download the result as PNG: it keeps an alpha channel, so the removed background is truly transparent, not white. If the PNG already has transparent areas they stay transparent. WebP with transparency is offered too and is usually smaller. A JPG cannot hold transparency at all, which is why this tool never saves one.

Can I remove a white background on iPhone?

Yes, in Safari or any iPhone browser. Tap Choose an image and pick a photo or a file; the page turns the photo upright from its orientation tag and does the rest on the phone. Download saves the transparent PNG (Safari asks where; Files is the usual place). Photos over 24 megapixels are scaled to 24 MP so they fit in the phone's memory, and the page says so.

How do I remove the white background from a signature and make it transparent?

Photograph the signature on plain paper, open it and tick Paper photo mode. The page estimates the paper's brightness across the photo and divides it out, so a shadow or a lamp's falloff turns white instead of staying grey, then keys the white away. Pick Black or Blue ink to give every stroke one clean colour, tick Trim to content, and download the PNG to place on a document. To draw a signature from scratch instead, use the Signature Maker.

Why is there a white halo around my logo, and how do I remove it?

The edge pixels of any smooth logo are a mix of the logo colour and the white behind it. Simple removers either keep them (a pale fringe on a dark page) or cut them (jagged edges). With Remove white halo on, each edge pixel gets an opacity from how far it sits from the background colour toward the nearby solid colour, and its colour is un-mixed, so a 50 % pink edge pixel becomes red at half opacity (the worked pixel above).