Remove the background from an image and get a transparent PNG back

The tool reads every pixel along the four borders of your image, not just the corners, and takes the most common colour it finds. One stray pixel in a corner, or artwork that runs off one edge, cannot throw the whole result off that way.

Then it floods inward from the border. Each neighbouring pixel close enough to that colour is deleted, and the flood carries on through it. A pixel that is different stops the flood dead. So the boundary of the removal is your artwork, wherever it happens to be, rather than a rectangle you drew.

The consequence worth understanding: an enclosed area survives. Take a round badge with a coloured ring and a white centre. The white outside the ring touches the border, so it goes. The white inside the ring is sealed off by the ring, the flood never reaches it, and it stays white. That is usually right, and when it is not, switching the spread to every matching pixel keeps nothing.

You can also skip the detection and name the colour yourself, or click any point on the Before image to take the colour from there. That is the fastest fix when the edges are a gradient and one specific shade is the one you want gone.

This is the common case, and JPG is what makes it fiddly. Lossy compression does not leave one exact white, it leaves thousands of near-whites, plus faint ringing along every hard edge. Three settings deal with it:

• Tolerance decides how far a pixel can drift from the sampled colour and still count as background. A clean PNG needs almost none. A JPG usually wants 10 to 20 per cent. Too high and it starts eating pale parts of the artwork, which the After panel will show you immediately.
• Soft edge fades the pixels just past the tolerance rather than cutting hard at the threshold. Without it a curved or diagonal edge comes out visibly stepped, because the anti-aliased pixels that blend the artwork into the background are either fully kept or fully deleted with nothing in between.
• Clean the colour out of the soft edge takes the background colour back out of those half-transparent pixels. Skip it and a logo keyed off white carries a pale halo that is invisible on a white page and obvious the moment it lands on a dark header.

Preview the result on dark as well as on the checkerboard. Fringing hides on light and shows on dark, and the dark header is where these files usually end up going wrong.

Worth being straight about what this does and does not do, because the phrase "background remover" covers two different things.

This is a colour key. It works on a flat, even background: a logo on white, a product on a studio sweep, a chart exported on one colour, a scanned signature. On those it is exact, instant, and it runs on your own machine.

It is not a subject cutout. Photograph a person against a real room and there is no single background colour to sample, so no tolerance setting will separate them. That job needs a model trained to recognise a subject, which is what the AI cutout services do. Use one of those for photographs and this for graphics.

The other honest limit: keying a JPG gives you a usable PNG, not a clean vector. The edges come from a compressed raster, so they will never be as crisp as the original artwork. If the logo is going on signage, a favicon or anything that scales, get the vector from whoever made it, or have it redrawn.

On a website, a logo with a baked-in white box gives you away:

• Dark headers and dark mode. A white rectangle around the mark is the single most common reason a site looks unfinished on its own dark theme.
• Partner and client logo rows. Mixed backgrounds in one row never line up, because each box is a slightly different white and a slightly different size.
• Anything over a photo. A hero image with a logo box sitting on top of it reads as a sticker.
• Favicons and app icons. These get rounded and masked by the platform, so a square background gets clipped at the corners in ways you did not choose.

Once the background is gone, run the result through the image trimmer to cut the now-empty margin down, or just tick "trim to what is left" here and get both in one pass.

All three free image tools work the same way, in your browser with nothing uploaded. Once the background is gone the image trimmer cuts the canvas down to what is left, or tick "trim to what is left" here and get both in one pass. To take a folder of photos down to a sensible size for a web page, use the bulk image resizer.