Whether you’re a full-time editor or a complete amateur, one of the most frustrating, tedious parts of editing photos is removing the background. Even if you have professional software like Photoshop or Corel PaintShop Pro, cutting out a subject can be a painstaking process, which is why you’re going to want to bookmark Remove.bg.
As the name suggests, Remove.bg is a free online service that uses artificial intelligence to detect the foreground of a photo and separate it from the background. All you have to do is upload a photo, wait a few seconds, and the site will produce a new version of the original image without the background. You don’t even have to download the image to your device first — you can just input the URL instead, and the result is the same.
We tested the service a few times and found it to be surprisingly accurate, especially considering how fast it works. The image below wasn’t an ideal test case, but Remove.bg still managed to find both discrete subjects and separate them from the background (though the blurry Steve Rogers didn’t come out pristine):
Before you delete your Photoshop app, it’s worth noting that there are limitations to the service. For now, Remove.bg only supports people and faces. The developers explain why this is the case on the site:
Our AI is trained to detect persons as foreground and everything else as background. That’s why it only works if there is at least one person in the image. In the future we want to support other kinds of images as well, such as product images.
Furthermore, while you can upload images of any resolution, “the output image is limited to 500 × 500 pixels.” The team is looking to increase that limit, but for now, any images the site produces will be relatively low-res. Either way, it’s totally free of charge, so don’t be afraid to try it next time you need to remove a background.
