Remove the background from an image and get a transparent PNG back
It takes the colour from the edges and works inward until it hits your artwork. Drop in a logo on white and the white goes, everywhere the edge can reach.
Most logos arrive as a JPG on a white square, which looks fine on a white page and terrible everywhere else. This makes the background transparent by sampling the colour at the border and flooding inward until it meets something different. The white inside a ring or inside the counter of a letter is not connected to the border, so it stays, which is what you want for a circular badge. Flip one setting if you want every matching pixel gone instead.
Why the white inside a ring stays
A round badge on a white square. The removal starts at the border and spreads inward, so it can only delete what it can walk to.
What you upload
White outside the ring, white inside it. Same colour, two different places.
What gets deleted
The shaded area. It spreads in from all four edges and the ring stops it, so the centre is never reached.
What you download
Transparent corners, white disc intact. Set the spread to every matching pixel if you want the centre gone as well.
Different job from the image trimmer, which cuts the outer margin down to a rectangle and cannot make anything transparent. Run the background removal first, then trim, or tick "trim to what is left" and get both at once.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I make an image background transparent?
Why is the white inside my logo still there?
What is the difference between this and the image trimmer?
Can it remove a photo background?
Why does my logo have a white halo on a dark background?
Are my images uploaded to a server?
Can I save it as a JPG?
Can I do a batch of logos at once?
How it decides what the background is
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.
Making a logo transparent when all you have is a JPG
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.
Removing a background is not tracing a subject
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.
Where a transparent PNG actually matters
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.
Other free tools
Image Trimmer
Free image trimmer that cuts the blank border off a PNG, JPG or WebP in your browser. It finds transparent or solid-colour edges on its own, handles batches, and never uploads your files.
Open Tool DesignBulk Image Resizer
Free bulk image resizer. Resize, compress and convert up to 100 images at once by longest side, exact size, percentage or target file size. Runs in your browser, nothing is uploaded.
Open ToolA keyed JPG is a patch. Want the real thing?
We redraw logos as vectors that stay sharp at any size, and build the websites they go on. Custom imagery is included in every package.
