Remove Color from Image Online for Free

The picture itself is the color picker. As you move over it, a small label shows the color under the pointer and its HEX code; click, and that exact color is removed. On a phone, tap the spot instead. Scrolling past the image still works, because only a tap counts as a pick.

If you already know the color, type its HEX code into the field beside the swatch: six digits such as 1E6FD9 apply as you type, and the three-digit shorthand F80 applies when you press Enter. The same field fine-tunes a color you clicked. That helps when a brand color is specified in a style guide but the image was saved as a JPG and is a shade or two off.

To remove more than one color, choose Add another color and click the next one. Up to eight colors can go at once, for example a white background together with a gray drop shadow, or the two greens of an unevenly lit screen. The highlighted color is the one your next click changes, and its × button brings that color back.

Tolerance is how different a pixel may look from the chosen color and still be removed. At 0%, only that exact color goes. At 100%, every color does. In between, pixels are compared by how different they look to the eye rather than by raw RGB numbers, so the same setting behaves alike on a white, black or colored background. Under the colors, a line reports how much of the image is now transparent, which makes each change easy to judge.

The default of 12% suits most flat backgrounds, including JPG files whose white is not perfectly even. If patches of background remain, raise the tolerance a few points at a time. If parts of the subject start to vanish, such as a pale highlight on a white background, lower it, or switch to Connected area so only the background goes.

Edge smoothing controls the soft band just beyond the tolerance. Pixels in that band are made partly transparent instead of being cut off, which keeps curves and lettering smooth. Set it to 0 for a hard cut that removes exact matches only.

A plain background is the most common color people remove. When an image opens, the tool checks its border, and if most of it is one color, that color is selected and the preview shows the result at once. A logo on white, a signature on paper, a product on a studio backdrop or a sprite sheet on magenta is usually done before you touch anything.

To remove a white background, the default settings normally work. Scans and phone photos of paper are slightly gray and uneven, so raise tolerance toward 20% if the corners stay visible. A black background behaves the same way, but JPG compression leaves faint colored speckles in dark areas, so it often needs a few more points of tolerance than white.

For a green screen, pick the green and then switch to Connected area, so a green tie or plant in the shot is kept. The edge smoothing also takes the green tint out of the outline instead of leaving a green rim. If the screen was lit unevenly, add the darker green as a second color rather than pushing tolerance until it eats into skin tones.

Color removal cannot tell a subject from its surroundings, only one color from another. When the background is a room, a street, a sky or anything with many colors, use the background remover, which finds the subject itself.

All areas removes the color wherever it appears in the image. That is what you want when the color itself has to go, for example the white paper inside the loops of a signature, or every red mark on a scan.

Connected area removes only the patch joined to the spot you clicked, spreading through matching pixels until it reaches a different color. The same color elsewhere stays. Use it when a white background surrounds a logo that has white lettering of its own, or when the subject contains the background color, such as a white shirt on a white wall with a clear outline between them.

Enclosed spaces are separate patches. In Connected area, the inside of an O or an A, or a gap between someone’s arm and body, is not joined to the background, so it stays. Choose Add another color and click inside each one to remove it too. Colors that were found automatically or typed as a HEX code have no clicked spot, so in Connected area they spread in from the edges of the image.

Anti-aliasing makes edges look smooth by blending the outermost pixels of a shape with the color behind it. Around a red logo on white, those pixels are pink. If a tool only deletes the white and leaves the pink, the logo shows a pale outline the moment it is placed on a dark background. This is the halo, or fringe, that most simple color removers leave behind.

Here, each edge pixel is un-mixed: the tool works out how much of it is the removed color and takes exactly that share out, leaving a partly transparent pixel of the logo’s own red. Thin lines and small text keep their weight, and green-screen outlines lose their green tint.

Use the preview background buttons under the image to check: the checkerboard shows what is transparent, while white and black show how the result will sit on a light or dark page. For pixel art, where every pixel should stay hard-edged, set Edge smoothing to 0.

The result is saved as a PNG because PNG stores an alpha channel: each pixel has its own transparency, from fully see-through to fully solid, alongside its color. JPG has no alpha channel, so a JPG cannot be transparent. JPG files can be opened here, and the PNG you download keeps every pixel the same size as the original. If you need the transparent image as WebP for a website, convert it to WebP afterwards; WebP keeps transparency too.

You can add JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC and AVIF images up to 40 megapixels or 16,384 pixels on a side. Areas that were already transparent stay that way. The downloaded file is a new image, so EXIF details such as GPS location and camera model are not copied into it. Transparent PNGs of photos can be large: to make one smaller, compress it or resize it after downloading.

Color removal works on color alone, which brings predictable limits. A subject that shares its color with the background loses those parts too; Connected area helps only when there is an outline between them. Shadows, gradients and glows are not one color. A soft glow or flame on black keeps its darker outer haze, which looks heavy on a light background, so effects like these are better combined with a Screen blend mode in a layer-based editor.

To remove all color and turn a picture black and white, use the Black & white filter or the Grayscale slider in the Photo Editor instead; that is a different job from making a color transparent. To hide part of an image rather than make it see-through, the image pixelator pixelates, blurs or blacks it out.

Your image is processed by your browser on your own device. It is not uploaded or stored anywhere, there is no account or watermark, and no daily limit on how many images you clean up.