Remove backgrounds

You have four tools for removing backgrounds, and all of them return a PNG with a transparent background. They differ in speed, price and how much of a difficult design they keep.

Which tool

Tool	Best for	Price
Fast Background Remover	Photos of people, products and pets, and most designs: 1 to 8 images per run, in a couple of seconds.	1 credit per image
Balanced Background Remover	The finest edges: flyaway hair against a busy background, fur, lace, folds and glass.	1 credit
Smart Background Remover	Designs with lettering, captions or frames that the quick cut-out sometimes loses. It checks its own result and redoes it when something is missing.	2 credits
Premium Background Remover	Glows, smoke, mist, sparkles, ink and other see-through parts, and white lettering on a coloured background.	95 credits

Start with Fast: it handles photos and most designs well. Use Balanced when the finest edges decide the result, and Smart if a title or a frame goes missing. Keep Premium for designs whose effects have to stay see-through.

Step by step

1. Open the tool. Fast takes 1 to 8 images in "Images"; the other three take one image in "Image". Balanced accepts PNG, JPG or WebP up to 5 MB and 16 MP, with sides between 256 and 4096 px; Smart and Premium accept up to 15 MB and 50 megapixels.
2. In Smart and Premium, "Trim alpha channel" is on by default: the PNG is cropped to the design. Turn it off to keep your image's size, for example to place the cut-out back over a mockup. Fast always trims.
3. Check the cost on "Run" and start it.
4. Download the PNGs or chain them into another step with Remix.

How Smart and Premium work

• Smart: on a plain background, the quick remover cuts the image out, and Smart lays the cut-out back over your background colour to check that no part of the design went with it. If something did, Balanced redoes it, with a second try if needed, and you get the cut-out that keeps more of your design. Photos and busy backgrounds go straight to Balanced. In our tests it takes 10 to 25 seconds.
• Premium: an image model redraws your image over pure white and over pure black, and the difference between the two gives the transparency of every pixel, so see-through effects stay see-through. Each result is checked and redone up to three times; if none passes, the quick remover gets a go and is used when it does better. A run usually takes under a minute, up to about two when it has to retry.

Shortcuts

• In the Studio, the "Remove background" button on each image runs Fast Background Remover on it.
• Templates, collections, Magic Improver and the multiple-images version of Design Style Transformer have their own option to remove the background: "fast" uses the quick mode and "balanced" is better at keeping lettering and small detached elements.
• To cut out a design and size it for a product in one run, use the "Remove bg and fix dpi" workflow: see Prepare a design for print.

More Studio shortcuts in the quick actions.