Start with a photo that separates well
Contrast between the subject and the background matters more than resolution. A dark coat against a dark wall forces any tool to guess where the edge runs; the same coat in front of a bright window gives a crisp line. If you can reshoot, move the subject a meter or two away from the wall: the background softens and the separation improves.
Use the original file. A photo straight from the camera roll, HEIC included, holds far more detail than a screenshot or a copy saved from a messaging app, which are resized and recompressed. The cutout is computed at the full resolution of the file, up to 25 MB.
Leave a little space around the subject. An elbow or an ear cut off by the frame becomes a hard straight edge in the cutout, and it looks odd as soon as the subject sits on a new background.
Run the cutout and check three areas
Drop the photo onto the tool or pick it from your files. Detection finds the main subject, whether a person, a pet, a product or a car, and separates it in about five seconds. People standing together count as one subject, which is usually what you want for a group shot.
Check the result at 100% zoom, not on the thumbnail, and look at three areas: the hair or fur line, transparent or shiny parts such as glasses, bottles and jewelry, and places where the subject has the same color as the background. Those are where automatic cutouts most often need a touch-up.
The Restore and Erase brushes fix small misses: paint back an earring the tool dropped, or remove a patch of background trapped between an arm and the body. They edit the mask rather than the pixels, so you can go back and forth without losing quality.
Keep hair, fur and fine edges natural
Hair is never a clean line. Single strands are partly transparent and mixed with the background color behind them. A good cutout keeps those strands semi-transparent instead of trimming them with a hard edge, and that is the difference between a portrait that looks pasted on and one that looks photographed in place.
Color spill is the other giveaway. A subject shot in front of a green hedge or a yellow wall picks up a tint along its edges. Edge cleanup replaces that tint with colors taken from the subject itself; keep it on whenever a light subject goes onto a dark background, or the reverse.
The cat in our sample photos is a good test: fur against a busy background. If a few whiskers disappear, trace them with a small Restore brush. It takes less than a minute, and nobody will spot the cutout.
Export in the right format
PNG keeps the transparency and loses nothing. It is the format for design files, presentations and anything you will edit again, with one drawback: a 12-megapixel cutout often weighs several megabytes.
WebP also keeps transparency, in a much smaller file, which is what you want on a website. JPG cannot store transparency at all: choose it only with a solid background, such as white for a product listing.
Avoid converting a transparent PNG to JPG in another app. Depending on the software, the transparent area turns black or white and the edge pixels keep a faint halo. Pick the background here, then export the JPG directly.
Product photos on a white background
Most marketplaces and online stores ask for a pure white background, RGB 255, 255, 255, with the product filling most of the frame. After the cutout, choose the White background, set the margin and export as JPG: it is the lightest file every platform accepts.
A product floating on pure white can look flat. Add the soft contact shadow so the object sits on a surface, kept subtle and directly under the product, as if lit from above. Check your marketplace’s rules first: some accept natural shadows, a few ask for none at all.
For a whole catalog, process photos in a batch, up to 50 at a time on Pro and Team, with the same background, margin and shadow. Every listing then lines up in the store grid without manual adjustments.
Frequently asked questions
Does removing the background reduce quality?
No. The cutout is computed at the full resolution of your photo and exported without resizing. Only JPG adds compression; choose PNG or WebP to keep every pixel.
Can I remove the background from several photos at once?
Yes, on Pro and Team: drop up to 50 photos and they are processed with the same settings. Each photo uses one credit.
What if the tool keeps the wrong subject?
Paint back what you want to keep with the Restore brush and remove the rest with the Erase brush. For busy scenes, crop closer to the subject before uploading.
