Create a Blank Image in Any Size or Color

Placeholders and mock-ups are the classic use. A layout, a slide or a website template needs something in the image slot before the real photo exists, and a gray rectangle with its dimensions written in the middle tells everyone what size the final picture must be. Developers use the same files as test images: a known size and color makes it easy to see whether a page scales, crops or compresses an image correctly.

A plain background is the other big group. A solid color image makes a clean background for a quote or an announcement on social media, a minimal phone or desktop wallpaper, or a backdrop for a product cut out with the background remover. In Combine Images, a blank canvas added first in Overlay mode works as a background that other pictures sit on.

Transparent images have their own jobs. A transparent PNG is a starting canvas for a logo or a sticker, an empty layer to draw on, or a spacer that takes up room in an email or an old web layout without showing anything. The tiniest of them, a 1 × 1 pixel image, is still used as a spacer and as a tracking pixel in emails.

Print is the last case: a blank A4 or Letter page at 300 DPI for a printable form, a colored background sheet, or a canvas to design a card on in another app. Because the resolution is stored in the file, the image comes out at the right physical size when it is placed in a document.

Screen presets match common display resolutions: Full HD is 1920 × 1080, QHD is 2560 × 1440 and 4K Ultra HD is 3840 × 2160, all in a 16:9 aspect ratio. The iPhone wallpaper preset is 1179 × 2556, the screen of the 6.1-inch iPhone 15 and 16 in Apple’s specifications; other phones differ, so type your own screen size if you know it.

Social presets use common sizes: 1080 × 1080 for a square post, 1080 × 1350 for a 4:5 portrait post, 1080 × 1920 for a 9:16 story or Reel, and 1200 × 630 for the preview image a link shows when shared. 1280 × 720 is the resolution YouTube’s help pages recommend for a custom thumbnail. Platforms change their layouts from time to time, so check the current guidance when an exact size matters.

The aspect ratio is the shape of the image, written as width to height. Lock aspect ratio keeps that shape while you change one side, so a 1920 × 1080 image becomes 1280 × 720 when you type the new width. Swap turns a landscape size into the matching portrait one, and back.

Pixels decide how much detail an image can hold; DPI (dots per inch, also called PPI) only says how large it should print. A 2480 × 3508 image at 300 DPI prints at A4, 210 × 297 mm, and the same pixels at 150 DPI would print at twice that width and height. DPI never changes the pixels, so screens ignore it. When you choose Print size, the tool converts the paper size to pixels for you and stores the DPI in PNG and JPG files, which the DPI checker can confirm.

White is the default and the most common choice: a plain white image for a document, a white background for a product photo or a blank page to print. Black suits screens, dark wallpapers and video frames. Any other color comes from the picker, the swatches or a hex code.

Transparent means the pixels have no color at all. The image keeps its size, but whatever is behind it shows through, so the preview shows a checkerboard there: the checkerboard is how editors draw transparency, and it is not saved in the file. Open a transparent PNG in a basic viewer and you may see white or black instead, because the viewer fills the empty area with its own background.

Opacity sits between the two. At 100% the color is solid; at 50% it is half see-through, which gives a tinted overlay that darkens or colors whatever it is placed over. Opacity works in PNG and WebP. JPG has no alpha channel, so a JPG is always fully opaque and a transparent one is saved white.

To make the background of an existing picture transparent, rather than starting from an empty one, use the transparent PNG maker or the background remover.

PNG is the best format for a blank image in almost every case. It is lossless, so the color you pick is exactly the color stored, it supports transparency and opacity, and a plain PNG is tiny: a white 1920 × 1080 image made here is about 350 bytes, and a 4K one about 1 KB. Without a label, the tool writes it as a one-color palette PNG, and that keeps it so light.

JPG is lossy and has no transparency. A solid color can come back a level or two off in one channel, which nobody can see but matters when you need a pixel-exact brand color. Choose JPG only when an app or a form accepts nothing else; the quality slider changes very little on a flat color.

WebP keeps transparency and opens in current browsers and most apps, though some older software still rejects it. Like JPG it may shift a solid color slightly. Not every browser can save WebP from a web page; if yours can’t, the tool tells you, and PNG works everywhere.

If you already have an image in another format and need it as PNG, convert it to PNG. Blank images rarely need compressing, but a JPG or WebP with a label can be made lighter with the image compressor.

A hex code is the six-character way to write a color on screens, such as #ffffff for white, #000000 for black and #1e90ff for a bright blue. The first pair of digits is red, the second green and the third blue, each from 00 to ff. The Hex code field takes the code with or without the #, and in the short three-digit form too: #fff is the same as #ffffff and 36c is #3366cc.

RGB writes the same color as three numbers from 0 to 255, so #1e90ff is RGB 30, 144, 255. The readout under the field shows the RGB values of the current color, which helps when a style guide gives one form and an app asks for the other.

The color picker is the quickest way to choose by eye. On a computer, some browsers add an eyedropper to it that can sample a color from anywhere on the screen, which is handy for matching a logo or a website. The swatches give one-click white, black, transparent, light gray, cream, slate and navy.

Match a brand color by pasting its hex code rather than picking by eye, and save as PNG so the file stores that exact value. If a brand guide only gives RGB, convert each number to two hex digits, or pick the color and compare the RGB readout.

Keep files small by leaving the label off and saving as PNG: a plain PNG stays under a few kilobytes even at 4K. A label adds real detail, so a labeled image is larger, and a JPG of the same size is usually larger still.

For a 1 × 1 pixel image, choose the 1 × 1 preset, then White, Transparent or any color, and save as PNG. The file is under 100 bytes. A transparent one is the classic spacer; a colored one can be stretched by a web page or an app into a block of that color.

To check what you made, open the file in the image size checker, which shows its pixel dimensions, file size and stored DPI. To fit an existing photo to one of these sizes instead, resize it or use the 1920 × 1080 resizer.