Cutting a person, animal or object neatly out of a photo is a difficult job. Even if you get the best photo editor, it’s still a lot of hassle. You have to know how to approach that. But it is also possible to outsource this painstaking work to an online service that specializes in this and works automatically.
Do you have a photo in which you, a friend or a family member is in the picture, but you are not satisfied with what can be seen in the background? Or do you want a nice photo that only shows a (pet) animal or object? Then you can consider buying expensive software and delving into advanced photo editing techniques. But even then it’s a hell of a job to accurately lift the foreground out of a photo, without leaving traces of the background. Fortunately, there is now a website that automatically takes care of all this for you. Without any prior knowledge, without buying software and without any effort. And the results? They look astonishingly good! How do you handle this?
Remove background
You are looking for a nice photo with a person, animal or object and visit the website www.remove.bg. Click on that Upload Image (or drag and drop the photo) and once the upload is complete, the hard work begins. Well, for the smart software then, because you can sit back and relax. Just a few seconds, because then the end result can already be admired on your screen. Don’t ask us how it is possible, but you, someone else, your pet or an object is neatly cut out within seconds and there is no longer a trace of the environment. How nice is that! To see how well it turned out, switch the top left of the preview between original and Removed Background.
Then you get with a click on Download the result on low resolution inside, or you click on Download HD for a high-resolution image. Of course we prefer the second option, but unfortunately you can only do that once. Not that you can’t do the same trick with even more photos, but then it just isn’t free anymore. Fortunately, the price is still manageable. Especially if you want to take care of a pile of photos (see box ‘Cut to size’). Always download your photos within an hour, because that is how long they remain available on the website.
Cut to size
Do you have one photo with a disturbing background? Then you’re in luck, because you can download one cropped photo in the highest resolution completely free of charge. After that you can download unlimited photos at low resolution via the website. We’re talking about a quarter megapixels (about 625 × 400 pixels), which is often doable for a profile photo.
It is of course more fun to crop your photos in high resolution. Fortunately, you can do that without breaking your piggy bank. One photo costs 1.99 euros. Or 0.90 euro cents to cut out ten photos. The more photos, the cheaper it gets. Maybe you can do it with someone? In addition, because you buy a credit in credits, you don’t have to crop your photos right away. For (business) large consumers, a subscription is an economical choice. You can read all about the costs at Pricing in the menu bar of the website.
New background
You can do a lot more with your cropped photo, so don’t click the download button too quickly. Just click in the top right corner of the cropped photo edit and then on Preview of High-Res, depending on which version (resolution) you want.
Via tab background you can now add a nice new background. So instead of in a boring living room or office space, you suddenly find yourself in the middle of a beautiful landscape, on a tropical island or you see the skyline of a metropolis behind you. Under the heading Photo choose such a nice background. You see the cut out person (animal or object) along with any background as a thumbnail, so that makes choosing easy. Feel free to click on a few promising backgrounds to admire them in large.
Some backgrounds are quite colorful and a bit crowded. That quickly demands all the attention. You solve that by scrolling back up and at the part blur (above the parts Photo and color) blur the background to a certain extent. This shifts your attention back to the person, animal or object in the foreground. Have you not chosen a background? Then you fade via blur the environment from your original photo. This gives you about the same effect as with the so-called portrait mode of modern smartphones, where the background is blurred by software.
Color or own photo
Instead of putting a different background in your photo or blurring the original one, you can also go for an even colored background via tab color. In addition to the standard colors that you can click on immediately, you can set a completely custom color via the first box in which you see a matrix of sixteen colors.
Do you have a photo with the ideal background on your computer? Well, then you use those anyway, instead of the default backgrounds from the website! In that case, at the top left of the backgrounds, click on Select Photo to upload your own background photo. With a photo of a beautiful landscape or a tourist hotspot, you can now make the most beautiful postcards. Or shoot something in the Christmas spirit and make your own Christmas cards. Or put together a beautiful invitation for something like a birthday, party or anniversary (as soon as all that is possible again).
Templates
It’s a bit hidden on the website, but if you go all the way down, you can go via Tools & API, Design Templates put yourself or someone else in a greeting card, take professional looking product photos and car photos. You can even replace a dull sky in a real estate photo with a beautiful cloudy sky. You choose a template, point to a photo of the right type, add a logo or text and the rest is automatic.
Minor points
Although the website is wonderfully good at cropping photos, sometimes it doesn’t work 100%. In a spectacle lens, for example, you can still see some remnants of background. If this happens, switch on the edit-page from Background tab to tab Erase / Restore. Do you see any remnants of the background from the original photo? Then click Erase, sets a brush size via Brush Size and click on the disturbing spot or paint over it.
Conversely, it may be that a part of the subject has been mistaken for the environment and a bite has therefore been taken out of a person, animal or object. In that case click on Restore and conjure up the missing puzzle piece with your mouse. It is a fairly basic way of updating, which makes complex corrections quite difficult to perform. A photo editor, such as Photoshop, is more suitable for that.
If the repair does not go as planned, you can undo your changes with the circular arrows at the top right of the preview, after which you can try again. To see whether the automatic cropping went perfectly, carefully scan the contours of the image crop. This works even better if you use the zoom buttons above the preview. Make sure that you immediately download a photo that you update yourself, with or without a new background or background color. Because you will immediately lose a self-updated photo as soon as you return to the upload page. Unfortunately, there you will see the automatically cropped version again. It is therefore best to first save a few variants by changing the background or color a few times before you leave the editing page.
Handle locally
In addition to cutting photos via the website and possibly providing them with a new background, you can also use Tools & API download a free program in the menu bar (Windows, Mac and Linux) with which you can get started locally. Processing will still be done online, but you can add your photos locally at your convenience and even have them cropped automatically all at once in one large batch. This is ideal if you want to edit large amounts of photos. You must create an account to use the program. You can do that via the website with the button Login / Sign up, or as soon as you use the program for the first time.
You point to one or more photos, add below the photo frame change to Select whether you want a transparent background, a colored one or whether you want to use one of the many templates (see the ‘Templates’ box). Furthermore, you give output size Select whether you want a free preview or the full resolution.
Bee Output Folder, where the results should be saved, click at the bottom right on Start. If you usually edit your photos with Photoshop, first put a checkmark next to it Photoshop file before pressing the start button. Because then additional psd files are saved that contain layers and masks. You can also update the crop yourself with this. Even with the free previews this is possible! This is especially useful if the auto-cropping didn’t go quite as expected. Finally, a plug-in is available on the website under Tools & API, with which you can crop photos directly from the Photoshop program and the result is also adjustable.
Background from video
It is not only a chore to make a person or object freestanding, as it is called. With video it is exactly the same and it is even a bit more complicated to do it all by yourself. Good news, because recently there’s a website that does the same trick with videos: www.unscreen.com. You work about the same as on www.remove.bg. This way you can easily and quickly turn a boring (home) office or other environment away in one go. Or you can replace it with a nicer background from another (your own) video.
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