Background remover for product and catalog photos
One photo at a time, on your own hardware: the U²-Net model runs inside the browser, picks the subject, and hands back a transparent PNG, a white one, or one on any solid color — with a slider to fine-tune the edge.
Right removes more background; left keeps more of the subject.
- Nothing uploaded
- Free, no sign-up
- Strips EXIF
- Batch files
A catalog shoot is fifty subjects on a table, and every one of them is wearing its background like a second outfit: the grey desk, the whiteboard behind, the seam of the studio wall that the light made visible. Publishing that set as-is means a catalog where every product sits in a different room — the product you are selling is the constant, and the room is not. The job every catalog, every listing and every packaging mockup eventually hits is the same: take the subject out of the room, and put it somewhere else.
This page does that one job, one subject at a time, entirely on your device. The U²-Net segmentation model (about 4.5 MB) downloads once into your browser cache and runs on your processor — your photo is never part of the traffic. It looks at the frame, returns a confidence map of where the subject is, and the page turns that map into an alpha channel you can slide to taste, then export on transparent, white or any color you name.
The honest scope: one image per cutout, no brush, no lasso, and no batch queue on this page — the model runs on your hardware and each subject gets its own pass. A fifty-product set is fifty passes, and on a modern laptop that is a coffee break, not a day. The output is a PNG at your photo's own resolution (capped at 2048 px on the long side for preview speed), which for a catalog frame is the size the web needs and the size most listing contexts ask for.
How it works
The cutout is one button and one slider; the export is one of three backgrounds.
Drop the photo
A JPG, PNG, WebP, BMP or GIF of the subject — one file at a time, because the model runs per image on your own device. A product on a table, a person against a wall, a single object on a shelf: the model picks the largest clear subject in the frame and builds the cutout from there.
Slide the cutout level
The level slider (default 50) is the threshold across the model's confidence map, and it redraws the edge instantly without re-running the AI. A halo of the old background clinging to the edge means slide right; chunks bitten out of a dark sleeve or a black product mean slide left. The preview keeps up with your hand, even on a phone.
Choose the background and save
The segment control offers transparent, white, or a solid color with a picker — the same model, three exports. Transparent is the one that composites onto a listing tile or a packaging mockup; white is the one a print shop wants on stock; a named color is the one that matches your brand board. Download the PNG; the source photo stays exactly where it was.
The model works at 320 pixels, scaled back up
U²-Netp takes a fixed 320 × 320 input: your catalog frame is squashed to that size, the network returns a confidence map at the same resolution, and the map is scaled smoothly back to your photo's full size to drive the alpha channel. The consequence is that the separation is decided at thumbnail scale — a shoe on a table, a bottle on a shelf — and the clean, confident calls come back exactly as clean. Detail that does not exist at 320 pixels is not in the answer: individual hair strands, thin cables, a chain-link fence. You get a plausible soft edge there, not a strand-by-strand cutout, and a pixel-exact border is not what this tool was built to draw.
Where product photos do — and do not — cooperate
The model picks the subject for you, and there is no brush or lasso to correct a wrong pick, so a tighter crop around the part you want is the only lever when the frame is crowded:
- Clean: one subject, a background that differs in brightness from the subject, even light, the whole product inside the frame
- Struggles: a white product on a white table, glass and anything translucent, a cast shadow that lands on the background
- Struggles: two products where you want only one, a shelf of similar items, a subject cropped by the frame edge
- Unpredictable: the shadow — sometimes it stays with the subject, sometimes it goes with the wall, and there is no setting that picks
The three exports, and which one the job actually takes
Transparent PNG is the working file: it composites onto a listing tile, a hero section, a packaging mockup, and the background you want is whatever design is behind it. White PNG is the print and marketplace default — flat, honest, and the one a print shop will not second-guess. A named solid color is the brand-board case: the same cutout sitting on your exact hex, so the product and the brand never argue about who is in charge.
One practical note across all three: the PNG is the format because it is the one with an alpha channel, and a detailed catalog frame at 2048 px lands in the megabytes. For a web tile, that is a file the page will load; for a listing upload with a size cap, running the white-background version through a JPG compressor on its own page is usually the lighter delivery, and the transparent cutout is the master you keep.
A whole shoot, one subject at a time
The queue holds one image per cutout, and that is the honest shape of the work on your own hardware: each subject runs the model, gets its slider pass, and ships with its chosen background. A shoot of fifty is fifty of those passes, and the time is the model on your device, not a server you are queued behind. The set as a whole is the catalog: same table, same light, same model, and the only thing that varies from product to product is the product — which is the point of doing this pass at all, before the set ever reaches a grid or a tile.
- One cutout per photo: no batch queue, no parallel runs — the model runs where your photo is
- The slider is per-image: a white sneaker and a black jacket in the same shoot want different levels, and each gets its own
- Output is capped at 2048 px on the long side — well past any listing tile, short of a print master
Frequently asked questions
My shoe is white and the table is white. Why doesn't the cutout take the whole table?
The model decides at 320 pixels where subject ends and background begins, and a white-on-white frame gives it a soft confidence gradient rather than a boundary. Two moves help: slide the cutout level until the table edge drops out of the alpha, or crop the frame tighter around the shoe first, so the table is less of the area the map has to divide. A white product on a grey or wood surface reads more cleanly than one on a white one.
Can I cut out a logo instead of a photo?
Sometimes — the model was trained on photographic subjects, but a logo on a flat background often comes out as a clean shape, because it sees one clear subject against a clear field. What it is not for is a UI screenshot or a flat-color knockout with thin strokes: those are a graphics editor's job. If the logo reads as one solid shape in the preview, it will be fine on a tile.
Why is the edge of a hair- or fur-heavy subject soft, not sharp?
That is the 320-pixel limit: a strand of hair is detail that does not exist at the resolution the mask is decided at, so the edge comes back as a plausible soft band rather than strand by strand. The level slider can tighten or loosen that band, but it cannot add resolution. For a product where the edge must be razor-clean, the fix is a tighter crop and a higher-contrast background at the shoot, not another pass of the slider here.
My listing needs a 500 × 500 tile, but the cutout came out 2048 wide. What now?
The long side is capped at 2048 px, which is larger than the tile needs: crop to the square that frames the product, then scale it to 500 on a resize page. The alpha channel survives the resize, so the product sits on its transparent or white board at tile size, exactly as it did at full size.
Is the white export just the transparent PNG saved over white?
Visually, yes — both put the product on white. The difference is the file: the white export is a flat, baked background, while the transparent one carries the alpha. A transparent PNG can move to another background later; a white one is committed. For a print job that will not move, white is the lighter, more predictable delivery; for a master that will sit behind future layouts, keep the transparent cutout.
Does my product photo go anywhere?
No. The 4.5 MB model arrives in your browser once and caches; your photo is decoded, segmented and encoded on your own device. Nothing about the image is part of any request — there is no upload queue behind you, and the source file in the shoot folder is untouched.