When this is the right page, and when it is not
Use it when the background really is white — a logo exported on white, a drawing scanned on white paper, a product photographed on a seamless sweep. The key does not guess what the subject is; it measures how far each pixel is from white, which is why it handles thin lines and small text that a subject solve rounds off.
It is the wrong page when the background is a room, a garden or anything with detail in it. Then the colour key has nothing to hold on to, and the guided selection on the front page — which fits colour models to your photograph — is the instrument to use. A person in front of a white wall usually works here, but hair against white is softer on the hair page.
What the three settings do
Tolerance is how far from white a pixel may be and still be certainly background. Softness is the ramp beyond that, where a pixel is partly removed. Connected to the edge keeps white that is enclosed by the subject. The defaults (6 and 4, connected) suit clean digital white; a photographed sheet wants the uneven-background switch and a little more tolerance.
- White subjects on white need help. A white mug on a white sweep has no colour difference along its rim. Lower the tolerance, then repair the rim with the keep brush on the Refine panel.
- JPEG noise near edges. A heavily compressed JPEG has blocky halos around dark shapes. Raise the softness slightly, and use halo shrink on the Edge panel if a pale rim is left.
Questions about removing white
Why does my logo get a grey or white ring when other tools remove the white?
Because the pixels along a black-on-white edge are not black or white — they are a mixture, and a tool that only decides kept or gone keeps them as solid grey. This page treats each edge pixel as a mix of the subject colour and white and solves how much of it is subject. The ring becomes soft transparency, so the edge looks right on a dark page.
Will it remove the white inside my subject as well?
Not by default. The key starts on 'connected to the edge': only white that the frame border can reach through other white is removed, so the white of an eye, a shirt or the inside of an 'o' that is enclosed by the subject stays. Switch to 'every matching pixel' on the Cut panel for text and line art where every white pixel should go.
My white is not quite white — it is a phone photo of paper.
Turn on 'uneven background' under the key colour. The background is then read as a smooth field across the frame rather than one value, so a shadow at one end of the page is still recognised as paper. Raise the tolerance a little if a pale cast survives.
Is anything downloaded?
No. The colour key is a few hundred lines of code that came with the page. No model is fetched on this route and the picture never leaves the tab.
What if the background is not white?
Use the eyedropper on the Cut panel to pick the colour you want gone, or the Black button for a black background. For a background that is a photograph rather than a flat colour, the guided selection on the front page is the right instrument.
Related
- Remove background from logoKeyed on the logo's own background colour, trimmed to the artwork, with a square canvas when you need one.
- Remove a background colourPick any flat colour off the photo — up to four of them, black included — and key it out with edges unmixed against it.
- JPG to transparent PNGRenaming a JPG does not make it transparent. This takes the background out and writes a real PNG with an alpha channel.
- Add white background to photoThe cutout laid on pure white, 255, 255, 255, square, as a JPEG — and the saved file checked to prove the white is exact.
