Remove the white background from an image

When you need the white gone

A lot of images arrive on a white box. A logo exported as a JPG, a signature scanned on printer paper, a pencil sketch photographed on a desk, clip art from an old document, a product shot on a white sweep. On a white web page that box is invisible. Put the same image on a dark slide, a colored banner or a photo, and the box shows up as an ugly rectangle.

Removing the white background turns that rectangle into transparency. The result is a PNG where only the subject has pixels, so it sits on any color without a frame around it. This is the opposite of making a background white, which adds white behind a subject. If you want to understand what transparency actually is in a file, the transparent PNG guide explains it.

Where it works well

The model looks for the main subject and separates it from what is behind it. A clear subject on plain white is the easiest case there is, so most images come out clean on the first try:

• Logos and wordmarks with solid colors on white.
• Product shots on a white sweep or light box.
• Clip art and icons with a dark outline.
• Drawings and sketches with firm, dark lines.

Because it is not a "delete every white pixel" tool, it also handles off-white paper, uneven scans and soft studio shadows. You do not have to clean the white up first.

Where it struggles

The hard cases are the ones where the subject itself contains white or very light areas.

White parts of the subject. A white shirt on a white wall, a white sneaker on a light box, a white star inside a red badge. To the model these look like background and can be cut away. Paint them back with Restore.

White trapped inside shapes. The holes in letters such as a, e, o and B, the loops in handwriting, the gap between a mug and its handle. These are not connected to the outer background, so they are sometimes kept. Clear them with Erase. The logo page covers this in more detail.

Thin white lines and light text. Fine white strokes inside a logo, or pale gray text under a dark heading, can break up or vanish. Restore them, or if a tagline is too thin to save, set it again as live text in your design tool.

Faint pencil and ink. Light strokes on paper can fade or break. For signatures, the signature page has tips on scanning and on cleaning up the strokes.

Touching it up

After the cut-out, choose Touch up edges. Zoom in and switch between the two brushes:

• Restore brings back anything from the original that should have been kept.
• Erase removes leftover white that should have gone.

Use a small brush along edges and inside letters, and a larger one for big patches. Undo is there if a stroke goes too far. Check the result on the checkerboard, then switch the background to black for a moment: leftover white specks and pale fringes stand out much more against dark.

A pale fringe on dark backgrounds

When a logo or drawing was first saved on white, its edge pixels were blended with that white so the outline looked smooth. After the white is removed, those edge pixels stay slightly lighter than the subject. On a white page you never see it. On a dark page it reads as a thin glow. A light pass with Erase along the edge reduces it. If you can get a version of the file that was exported on transparency in the first place, that is cleaner still.

Which format to download

Download PNG. It keeps the transparent area, it is lossless, and it keeps flat colors exact. WebP also keeps transparency and makes smaller files for websites. Avoid JPG here: it has no transparency, so the download fills the background with white again, which undoes the whole job. The download is full size, up to 25 megapixels.