How to do it, step by step
- Try the free built-in route first On an iPhone XS or newer, press and hold the subject in Photos until it shimmers, then choose Copy or Share. On a Mac, right click the file in Finder and choose Quick Actions, then Remove Background.
- Check the edge at full size Pinch in to 100 per cent and inspect hair, fingers, straps and anything transparent. Cutouts look perfect at thumbnail size and show their faults at full size.
- Fix or re-route if the edge fails For a flat background, tidy it with Instant Alpha in Preview's Markup toolbar. For a difficult one, use Snapseed's Double Exposure and mask the subject back in by hand, or use a cloud cutout service.
- Save it as a PNG, not a JPEG Transparency only survives in formats that support it. A JPEG will fill the transparent area with white, usually without telling you.
- Place it on the new background and match the light Put the cutout on its new background and check the direction of the light on both. A subject lit from the left on a background lit from the right is what makes a composite look fake, more than any edge artefact.
- Kill the halo If a pale fringe outlines the subject, shrink the selection by a pixel or two, or darken the outer edge slightly in whatever app you are using. A bright outline is the last visible sign of a cutout.
The fastest free route on iPhone
Open the photo in Photos, press and hold on the subject for about a second until an outline shimmers around it, then lift your finger. A small menu appears with Copy and Share. Copy puts a cutout on the clipboard that you can paste straight into Messages, Notes, Mail, Keynote or Pages. Share hands the same cutout to the share sheet, so you can save it as a file or send it somewhere.
This has been in iOS since version 16 and it needs an A12 Bionic chip or newer, which means iPhone XS, XS Max, XR or any later model. It works in Photos, Files, Safari, Messages, Quick Look and on screenshots, so you can lift a subject out of an image on a web page without saving the page first. On a long-press the phone picks the most prominent subject; on images with two obvious subjects it will often take both.
Two practical cautions. The cutout is a PNG with a transparent background, and some apps flatten transparency onto white when you paste, so check the result in the destination rather than assuming. And the edge quality varies enormously with the source photo: a person against a plain wall comes out cleanly, while flyaway hair against a busy background comes out with chunks missing or with background trapped inside the strands.
Zoom in on the edge at full size before you use it anywhere. Cutouts look flawless as thumbnails and show their failures at 100 per cent.
On a Mac it is one right click
Select the file in Finder, right click, choose Quick Actions and then Remove Background. macOS writes a new PNG next to the original with the background gone and leaves the original untouched. This arrived in macOS Ventura and is still there in the versions after it. It works on several files at once, which makes it the fastest free way to process a batch.
For anything the automatic version gets wrong, Preview has a manual tool. Open the image, show the Markup toolbar, and use Instant Alpha: drag across an area and it selects a contiguous region of similar colour, which you then delete. It is crude compared to a proper masking tool but it is precise where automatic selection fails, particularly on flat-coloured backgrounds like a studio white or a painted wall.
If the file has to end up with a white background rather than a transparent one, do the removal first and then place the cutout on a white canvas, rather than trying to bleach the original. Deleted background and painted-over background look different at the edges, and the difference shows on any screen that is not the one you made it on.
Android and everything else
Check the gallery app you already have before installing anything. Recent Samsung and Google phone software includes a similar long-press subject extraction in the gallery or photo viewer, with the same strengths and the same weaknesses at hair and fine edges. Because the feature name and the supported models change between software versions, the reliable test is simply to long-press a subject in your own gallery app and see whether an outline appears.
If it does not, the browser route works on any device. Our own remove a person from a photo tool runs entirely in the browser with no upload, and it is built for painting out a person from a scene rather than for isolating a subject, which is a different job. Web cutout services do the isolating job well, but almost all of them upload your image to a server to do it, so treat them the way you would treat any upload.
The general rule across platforms: a built-in feature is free, instant and fails on hair. A cloud service is slower, usually costs something for the full-resolution result, and handles hair far better. Choose by whether the edge is going to be examined.
Snapseed, free, but read this first
Snapseed is free, has no subscription, and is Google-owned, which makes it the obvious free suggestion. It is worth being honest about what it does: Snapseed has no automatic cutout tool. There is no button that removes a background.
What it has is Double Exposure plus masking, which does the job by hand. Open the new background, add your subject photo as a double exposure, set the blend mode, then use the layer mask to brush your subject back in and leave the rest hidden. Done carefully it produces a better result than an automatic cutout on difficult edges, because you decide where every edge falls. It also takes ten minutes rather than one second.
Snapseed's genuinely excellent free tool for this family of problems is Healing, which is patch-based and works well for removing a small distraction from a background: a sign, a bin, a person in the distance. If what you actually want is a clean background rather than a transparent one, healing the offending object out is often faster and more convincing than cutting the subject out and rebuilding behind it.
When paying is actually worth it
| Route | Cost | Where it runs | Hair and fine edges | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone long press (Photos) | Free, built in | On the phone | Fair. Fails on flyaway hair | One image, fast, anything not examined closely |
| Mac Finder Quick Action | Free, built in | On the Mac | Fair, same engine family | Batches of files, fast |
| Preview Instant Alpha | Free, built in | On the Mac | Good on flat backgrounds, manual | Fixing what the automatic route got wrong |
| Snapseed Double Exposure | Free, no subscription | On the phone | As good as your patience | Background swaps where you control every edge |
| Photoroom | Free tier, subscription for the rest | Cloud, upload required | Good | Product shots, batches, templated backgrounds |
| Picsart | Free tier, subscription for the rest | Cloud, upload required | Good | Cutouts inside a wider editing workflow |
| Canva | Paid feature | Cloud, upload required | Good | When the cutout is going into a design you are already making there |
Pay when the edge will be examined, when you need many images done consistently, or when the subject has hair, fur, glass or motion blur at its boundary. Do not pay for a single image going into a Story at phone size, where the built-in lift is indistinguishable from the paid result.
One correction worth making, because it causes confusion: Clean Up in Apple Photos is not a background remover. It paints objects out of a photo and leaves the background intact, and it is available on iPhone 15 Pro and newer with iOS 26. Blurring a background is a third, separate job again.
Shooting so the cutout works
Every automatic background removal is an edge-detection problem, so the fix for bad cutouts happens at capture rather than in software.
- Plain background, contrasting colour. A pale wall behind dark clothing, or the reverse. Automatic selection fails wherever the subject and the background are the same tone.
- A metre of separation. Standing a metre off the wall stops your shadow falling onto it, and a shadow attached to the subject is the single most common thing that comes out attached to the cutout.
- Even, soft light. Hard light creates dark edges on the subject that read as background, and bright rim light creates a halo the selection will include.
- Hair tied back, or accept the loss. Nothing handles flyaway strands against a busy background well, free or paid.
- Hold still. Motion blur destroys the boundary. Any blurred edge becomes a ragged one.
- 1x, and fill the frame. A larger subject means more pixels on the boundary, and more pixels means a cleaner edge.
Ours, and not out yet: ShutterAI includes Lift, a cut-out tool, alongside Clean Up for removing people from a scene, with the Vault keeping the original so any of it can be undone later. It ships on iPhone this fall, free to start, and there is a waitlist. Everything above works today without it.
Questions people ask
How to remove background from a photo for free?
On an iPhone XS or newer, press and hold the subject in Photos until it shimmers and choose Copy or Share. On a Mac, right click the file in Finder and choose Quick Actions, then Remove Background. Both are built in, free and take about a second.
Does Snapseed remove backgrounds?
Not automatically. Snapseed has no cutout tool. It can swap a background by hand using Double Exposure with layer masking, which gives you control over every edge but takes several minutes. Its Healing tool is the better free option if you only want a distraction removed.
Why does my cutout have jagged edges around the hair?
Because automatic selection works on contrast at the boundary, and fine hair against a busy or similar-toned background gives it nothing to work with. Reshoot against a plain contrasting wall, or mask it by hand. No app handles this case perfectly.
How do I save a photo with a transparent background?
Save it as a PNG. JPEG has no transparency and will fill the removed area with white. Check the result in the app you are pasting into, because some apps flatten transparency on paste.
Is Clean Up in Apple Photos a background remover?
No. Clean Up removes objects from a photo and fills in behind them, leaving the background in place. It is on iPhone 15 Pro and newer with iOS 26. Removing a background and removing an object are different jobs.