How to Make a Picture’s Background Transparent Online in Seconds for Free

Tremaine Eto
The Startup
Published in
5 min readJan 21, 2021

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Original photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

There are times where you want to remove the background of a picture to leave just the object or person in the foreground.

There are ways of doing this with tools like Photoshop, GIMP, Pixlr, and more, but they require a little bit of know-how, effort, and precision. The method that I’m going to show you today literally takes seconds and is easy for anyone to do. Also, I’m not at all affiliated with this site; just thought it was cool.

The site is called, fittingly, remove.bg. When you go there, you’re met with the following landing page:

Now honestly, it seems little too good to be true. This article actually serves not only to show that it can remove backgrounds, but also to test how good it actually is. I hope by the end of this, we’ll have a decent enough sample size to show when you can use it.

Easy: A solid background

First, let’s take a cute photo of a dog that has a pretty uniform background:

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Tremaine Eto
The Startup

Senior Software Engineer @ Iterable | Previously worked at DIRECTV, AT&T, and Tinder | UCLA Computer Science alumni | Follow me for software engineering tips!