About the cutout

A page that does forty operations has to be shallow about all forty. A page that does one can afford a control for the width of the uncertain band, a separate path for ink on paper, four backing colours whose only purpose is to reveal a fringe you would otherwise miss, and several thousand words about the cases where none of it works. That depth is the entire argument for a site this narrow, and it is the reason there is no cropping here, no resizing, no filters and nothing that puts a new scene behind what you extracted.

It also means the export panel is short by design. One format comes out, and it is the one format that can carry what was made. Offering a second would mean offering a way to destroy the thing you came here for.

The cutting happens in the tab you have open. The picture is decoded into memory, the boundary is solved by code that arrived with the page, and the PNG is assembled by your own browser before being handed to whatever you use for downloads. There is no server doing image work behind this site, because there is no server behind this site at all — it is a set of static files.

That choice costs something and it is worth naming. A service with a graphics card in a data centre can run a much larger model than a browser tab can, and on a difficult photograph it will beat this. What it cannot do is work on a picture it never receives.

Not a flawless boundary, not a single tap, and not a number about how fast anything here is. The page tells you where the method breaks — fine hair on a busy ground, glass, netting, motion blur, a subject too small to have an edge at all — because a person who knows the limit before they start gets a better result than a person who discovers it afterwards.

Where something is not built yet, it says so rather than half-shipping it. Colour subtracted from the fringe, a scribble mode that re-solves inside a stroke, and a batch queue are all real plans and none of them is pretending to exist today.

It is run by the team behind PictureEditor.com, which builds the larger multi-step editor. This is one of a set of single-purpose pages that exist because the query someone types is usually one operation rather than a workflow, and because a page that answers exactly that question can be better at it than a suite.

If something here is wrong, the useful report is the one that names the photograph: what was in front, what was behind, what setting you used and what came out. Those are the reports that change the code.