Remove an image background

No, by either method. Draw a box and everything happens in JavaScript on this page, with no network request of any kind. Choose Automatic and a neural network runs inside your browser using WebAssembly; the image is still never transmitted, but the model file itself is downloaded once from a public CDN and then cached.

Draw a box uses GrabCut, a method from 2004 that works purely from colour: it learns what is inside your box and what is outside it, then finds the boundary that best separates the two while following the edges in the picture. It needs no download and no network, and it is very good when the subject and the background are different colours. It has no idea what a person is, though, so a grey coat against a grey wall will defeat it. Automatic uses a segmentation network that does know what a subject looks like, so there is no box to draw and it copes with a cluttered background — at the cost of an 80 MB download the first time.

Only the Automatic method has a slow first run: the model has to be downloaded before anything can happen, and it is roughly 80 MB. Your browser caches it, so every image after that needs no download at all — and on a machine with WebGPU the model then runs in well under a second. Drawing a box has nothing to download and takes a second or two of arithmetic instead, every time.

Yes, and you do not need another program. Switch the brush to Restore and paint over whatever is missing — a raised hand, a bag strap, the wisps at the top of the hair — and it comes straight back at full detail. Erase does the opposite for anything that was wrongly kept. There is an Undo, and the Trim slider pulls the whole edge in by a pixel or two if a rim of the old background is still showing. With the box method you can also feed your marks back into the cut, which relearns the colours from them and applies the same correction everywhere else that looks alike.

Subjects that are clearly separated from their background — a person, a product, an animal — with reasonable lighting. Fine strands of hair, motion blur, transparent objects such as glass, and backgrounds that are the same colour as the subject are all genuinely hard. Where the model is unsure it hands back a partly transparent result rather than guessing, and the brush is there to settle it either way.

It is a good first step. Remove the background here, choose white or light grey, then take the result to the Passport Photo tool to crop it to the official dimensions. Do check the specification for your country, since some authorities are particular about the exact shade and about shadows.

Yes, though the one-time model download is large enough to be worth doing on Wi-Fi, and very large photos may run out of memory on older devices. If it struggles, resize the photo down first.