A logo on a white box, a product shot on a grey sweep, a photo against a green screen: each looks wrong on a coloured page until the background goes. Make the background transparent, and the picture sits cleanly on any colour, slide or design.
This tool lets you make an image transparent when its background is one plain colour. You choose the colour, or pick it from the picture, and set how close a shade must be to go. Think of it as a transparent background maker for plain colours: it runs in your browser, it is free, and it saves a PNG or WebP that keeps the transparency. It is a colour key, not a cut-out: it does not trace people or objects in busy photos. Below: how each control works, which pictures suit it, and how to get clean edges.
How to make an image transparent in your browser
- Press Select images, or drop one or more pictures onto the page. JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP, TIFF, ICO and iPhone HEIC photos all open.
- Choose the Colour to remove: White, Black, Green, Blue or any colour. Or press Pick from picture, then click the background on the stage.
- Set Tolerance: how close a colour must be to be removed. It starts at 20.
- Set Edge softness for a smooth or a hard edge. It starts at 10.
- Check the result against another backdrop with Preview on, then press Make transparent and save. The name ends in _transparent.
The stage shows the real result over a checkerboard, the usual sign for transparent. Hold to compare shows the original, and Split view puts the two side by side. Pick from picture reads the colour from the original picture, not from the preview, so it gets the true background shade.
What a colour key can and cannot do
The tool measures how far each pixel's colour is from the one you chose. Pixels close enough become transparent, those a little further become partly see-through, and the rest stay exactly as they are. That works well when the background is one even colour, and poorly when it is not.
| Picture | Works well? |
|---|---|
| A logo or an icon on plain white | Yes |
| A signature or drawing scanned on white paper | Yes, with Tolerance raised a little for the paper |
| A product on a plain, evenly lit backdrop | Usually, if the shadows are soft |
| A person in front of a green screen | Yes, with Green or a colour picked from the screen |
| A person in a room, a street or a garden | No: that background has many colours |
| A white shirt in front of a white wall | Partly: where the shirt touches the wall, it goes too |
For people in everyday photos, this is the wrong tool, because it does not look for their outline: use Remove background for a photo of a person. This tool removes one colour, such as a plain white or green backdrop. For a green screen photo it is a good fit, and for moving pictures Remove a green screen from video does the same job on a clip.
It also cannot make a picture transparent all over, like a faded watermark: it removes one colour, and every pixel that does not match stays exactly as it is.
Tolerance, Edge softness and the edges-only switch
Three controls decide what goes and what stays. Change one at a time and watch the stage, which updates with the real result.
Tolerance
Tolerance runs from 0 (Exact) to 100 (Loose). At 0 only the exact colour goes. Raise it when the background is uneven: the faint blotches of a JPG, the grain of paper or a gentle gradient. Raise it too far, and parts of the picture close to the background colour start to vanish, so watch pale edges and soft shadows as you go.
Edge softness
Edge softness runs from 0 (Hard) to 50 (Soft). It sets how gradually pixels fade from removed to kept. A little softness avoids jagged steps on curves and lettering; 0 gives a crisp, all-or-nothing cut, which suits pixel art and flat icons.
Only the background around the edges
This is on by default. The tool starts at the border of the picture and spreads inwards through matching colour, so only background joined to the edges is removed. The same colour inside the picture, such as the white of an eye in a logo, stays. Holes inside letters such as O and A stay too, because they are not joined to the edge. Switch it off to remove a background colour wherever it appears.
Make a PNG transparent, or a JPG into a transparent PNG
A PNG with a solid background takes the same steps as any other picture: open it here and make its background transparent. A JPG cannot hold transparency, so going from JPG to PNG transparent means two jobs: removing the background colour and changing the format. This tool does both in one go: open the JPG, choose its background colour, and save it as PNG (or WebP). For a plain format change that keeps the background, use JPG to PNG.
- Check on a dark and a light backdrop. Preview on offers Checkerboard, Ink, White, Red or any colour. It only changes the stage and is never saved.
- Look for a pale fringe. Edge pixels keep a little of the old background colour, so a light halo can show on Ink. Raise Tolerance slightly to clear it.
- Pick the colour from the picture. A white background is often not pure white, and Pick from picture gets the real shade.
- Start from the best copy you have. A PNG with a flat background keys more cleanly than a heavily compressed JPG.
- Trim a frame first. If the picture has a border in another colour, the search from the edges stops at it, so cut it off with Crop image.
If nothing matches, the button is blocked and the note under it explains why: No part of the picture matches that colour. Pick another colour or raise the tolerance. It means nothing close enough to that colour was found or, with the edges-only switch on, nothing joined to the edges. Pick the colour from the picture, raise Tolerance, or switch off Only the background around the edges. Zoom in with + to check fine edges, and press 0 to fit the picture again.
PNG or WebP, batches and privacy
Save as offers PNG or WebP, and both keep the transparency. JPG is not offered, because it has no transparency. A transparent PNG keeps every pixel exactly and opens almost anywhere; WebP is saved at high quality and suits websites.
Select up to 100 pictures to remove the same colour from each, such as a set of icons or product shots on one backdrop. The button reads Make 12 transparent, a file that cannot be opened is skipped, and Save all as ZIP saves the results together. For logos and signatures on white, the remove white background page starts with everything set for that job. Once a logo is transparent, you can watermark your photos with it, and only the logo is drawn.
- It runs in your browser. The picture is never uploaded, and our server does no picture work.
- It is free, with no account and no watermark. Image tools are not counted in the free daily limit, which applies to document conversions only.
- It works in current Chrome, Edge and Firefox. Very large pictures may be too big for your browser.
Read how files are treated on the privacy page.
Clear that background now
Choose the colour, set Tolerance and Edge softness, check it on a backdrop and press Make transparent. To make an image transparent for a logo, a scan or a green screen photo, that is all it takes.
It is free, private and runs in your browser. Select a picture above to start.
