Remove a background, or erase an object

What this tool does

Two ways to clean up a photo: cut the subject out onto a transparent background, or paint over something you want gone and let the tool fill it in. The first use downloads the model it needs, once, and then works offline.

Remove Background is not built yet. The page is here so you can see what the tool will do, but there is nothing to run: the engine behind it is still being written. Nothing on this page processes anything, so there is nothing to upload either way.

Frequently asked questions

Does removing the background upload my photo anywhere?

No. The photo is decoded, processed and re-encoded entirely inside your browser tab, and the file you download is built from that same in-memory copy. The only network request the tool makes is a one-time download of the model weights themselves, which contain no information about your image.

Why does the first use need to download something?

Background removal and object erasing both need a trained neural network, and networks are too large to sit in a page you might not use. So the weights are fetched the first time you open this tool — about 4.4 MB for the background matte, and about 198 MB for the object eraser — with a progress bar, and cached afterwards so a repeat visit does not download them again.

Does it work offline?

Yes, after that first download. Once the weights are cached by your browser, the tool works with no connection at all, which is also a useful way to see for yourself that nothing is being sent to a server.

How well does it handle hair and fine edges?

Reasonably, with an edge-cleanup pass that softens the cut-out rather than leaving it jagged. It is a small, fast model rather than a large portrait-specific one, so very wispy flyaway hair and fur will not be perfect. A hard-edged subject — a product, a logo, a person against a plain wall — comes out much more cleanly than a cat on a patterned sofa.

What happens to the rest of the photo when I erase an object?

Nothing. Only the area you painted, plus a small margin around it, is sent through the inpainting model and then blended back at the photo's own resolution. Every pixel outside that region is the original pixel, untouched, so a 3000-pixel-wide photo is still 3000 pixels wide outside the brush stroke.