Change the background of a photo

Three kinds of new background

The changer gives you three options, and you can try each one against the same cutout.

• Color: one flat color from the picker. Good for clean headshots, catalog shots and anything that will sit on a page with lots of other content.
• Gradient: a two-stop linear blend with an angle you set. A gentle step between two close shades looks like a studio backdrop. A strong pair at a steep angle suits posters and thumbnails.
• Image: a picture you choose from your device. It is cover-fitted, which means it is scaled to fill the frame and trimmed at the edges rather than stretched. Like your photo, it is held only in memory.

Making the subject look like it belongs

A swapped background looks real when the light agrees. If your subject is lit from the left, pick a scene where the light also falls from the left. Match warmth too: a person shot under warm indoor light looks odd on a cold blue beach. Eye level matters as well. A photo taken from below sits badly on a background shot from above.

Edge settings depend on the new background. Over a flat color, keep Edge softness low so the outline stays crisp. Over a busy or blurry picture, a slightly softer edge of 2 to 4 px blends better. If a rim of the old scene shows against the new one, move Shrink/grow edge a pixel or two inward and touch up with the Erase brush.

Person or Any subject

Person, the 25.9 MB default, is trained on people and keeps hair soft. Any subject, an 88.1 MB opt-in, is made for products, pets and objects. If the Person model finds almost nothing, the editor says so and suggests switching.

Once a mask is worked out for a version of your photo, every background tool shares it. You can try a gradient here, move to Background blur, then come back, and the cutout is not run again.

Trying options side by side

Each background you apply becomes a version in History. Use Hold to compare, or the before and after slider, to check it against the step before, and click any earlier step to go back. Up to 20 versions are kept while the page is open.

Because the new background is opaque, JPEG is fine for the export and keeps the file small. Choose PNG when you want no compression loss, for example before editing the result further somewhere else.

What it will not do

• Fine hair, glass, smoke and semi-transparent objects can come out imperfect; use Erase and Restore to fix them.
• The tool does not relight the subject. Pick a background whose light roughly matches your photo.
• Background pictures are cover-fitted, so parts of a picture with a different shape will be cropped off.
• The mask is computed on a copy of at most 4096 px on the long side and scaled up to the full photo.

Devices and downloads

The Person model is a 25.9 MB download the first time; Any subject is 88.1 MB and downloads only if you pick it. Both are Apache-2.0 licensed and cached in your browser for later. They run in a background worker, on WebGPU where your browser has it and on WebAssembly where it does not. Any subject needs about 17 seconds per photo on WebAssembly and a second or two on WebGPU. Compositing the new background is ordinary drawing and needs no download.

On-device AI: A small neural network that runs on this device after a one-time download. See what is stored on this device.

Step by step

1. Open a photo. Drop, paste or choose the picture whose background you want to replace.
2. Let the cutout run. Keep Person for people, or switch to Any subject for objects and animals.
3. Pick a background. Choose Color, Gradient or Image, and adjust the color, angle or picture.
4. Refine and export. Adjust the edge if needed, compare with the previous version, then save as JPEG, PNG or WebP.

Questions about background changer