Cut a person out of a photo

Why a people-only page

Background remover lets you choose between a people model and a larger any-subject model. This page skips the choice. It runs Person, a 25.9 MB model trained on portraits, and nothing else. That keeps the download small and the result focused on what people photos need: soft hair, natural shoulders and a believable outline around ears and collars.

If you need to cut out a product, a pet or a car, Background remover offers Any subject for that. Here, if the model finds almost no person in the frame, you will see “No person found — try Any subject” as a hint that this is the wrong page for the photo.

Taking a photo that cuts out well

Most of a good cutout is decided when the picture is taken. A few habits help a lot.

• Stand a step or two away from the wall, so the person and the background are clearly separate.
• Choose a background that differs in color and brightness from the hair and clothes.
• Use even light. Strong backlight blends hair into the sky; a window to one side is usually kinder.
• Keep the whole head and shoulders in frame; heads cut off at the edge leave an awkward straight line.

Fixing hair, hands and gaps

Turn on Mask view to see what is kept, tinted red. Look at three places: the outline of the hair, the hands and fingers, and the gaps between arms and body, where the old background often survives. Erase removes those gaps; Restore paints back a missed hand or strand. Adjust the brush size so you are not painting more than you mean to.

For the whole outline, Edge softness feathers from 0 to 10 px and Shrink/grow edge moves the border by up to 6 px. A setting of 1 to 2 px softness usually makes hair look natural without leaving a glow.

Using the cutout

Export as PNG or WebP so the transparent area is kept; JPEG would fill it in. The cutout is also shared with the other background tools for this version, so you can open Background changer, Background colour or Sticker maker next and the person is already separated.

If you plan to place the person on a new scene, notice where the light falls in the original. A cutout lit from the right looks most natural on a background that is also lit from the right. For quick variations, apply one edge setting, compare it with the version before, and keep whichever reads better.

What it will not do

• This page offers the Person model only. Products, pets and objects need Any subject in Background remover.
• Flyaway hair, glasses lenses, veils and other semi-transparent parts can come out imperfect; use the brushes.
• The mask is computed on a copy of at most 4096 px on the long side and scaled up to the full photo.
• Transparency is kept only in PNG or WebP exports, not JPEG.

Devices and downloads

The Person model is a 25.9 MB download, Apache-2.0 licensed, fetched once and then kept in your browser's cache. The editor shows its name, size and license first. It runs in a background worker, on WebGPU when your browser offers it and on WebAssembly otherwise, where a single photo takes around a second on a typical laptop processor.

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 portrait. Drop, paste or choose a photo with a person in it.
2. Let the model run. The Person model separates the person from the scene.
3. Check the outline. Use Mask view, then the Erase and Restore brushes and the edge sliders.
4. Save as PNG or WebP. Both keep the transparent background around the person.

Questions about person cutout