Make an Image Background Transparent

How to make a background transparent

1. Drop or paste the image. The colour around its edges is picked as the background automatically.
2. Check the checkerboard preview. If a pale halo remains, raise Tolerance; if parts of the subject vanish, lower it.
3. Use Edge softness to fade the outline smoothly instead of leaving a jagged fringe.
4. Keep Only the outside background on for photos and logos with white inside them; turn it off for text and signatures so the gaps inside letters clear too.
5. Download as PNG — or WebP if the file needs to be smaller.

What tolerance means

Tolerance is how different a pixel's colour can be from the background and still be removed, on a scale where 0 means an exact match and 100 is the difference between black and white. Clean digital logos need 2–8. JPEG product shots on white usually need 10–20, because compression leaves slightly off-white noise. Scans and phone photos of paper need 20–35, because paper is never evenly lit.

Getting a clean result

• Start from the largest, least-compressed copy you have — JPEG artefacts around the edges are what cause halos.
• For a photographed signature, shoot in even daylight with no shadow across the paper.
• If the subject itself is close to the background colour (a white cup on white), no colour-key tool can separate them — reshoot on a contrasting background.

Next steps: turn a transparent logo into a favicon or a Windows .ico, crop it round with the circle crop tool, or read which formats support transparency. For a logo that has to stay sharp at any size, trace the transparent result into a vector with PNG to SVG (or start from a JPG with JPG to SVG).