Free · In your browser · No upload
Remove a color from an image
Click the color you want gone — like a white background — tune the tolerance, and export a transparent PNG.
Many images to do? Try remove a color from images in bulk.
Need more than one operation? Open the full editor to combine tools and reorder your edits.
This tool works by comparison rather than understanding. You pick a colour; it measures how far every pixel is from that colour and makes the close ones transparent. There is no notion of a subject or a background involved, which is exactly why it is fast and precise on flat backgrounds and useless on photographs.
The distance calculation weights green most heavily, then red, then blue, roughly matching how sensitive human vision is to each — so the tolerance slider behaves more predictably than a raw numeric comparison would. Edges are feathered rather than cut hard: pixels just past the threshold get partial transparency, which is what stops anti-aliased text from coming out jagged.
How it works
- 1
Load your image. Logos, scans, screenshots, and diagrams with flat backgrounds work best.
- 2
Click the colour you want to remove directly on the preview to sample it exactly — a "white" background is often not pure white. There is also a one-click White preset and a hex field.
- 3
Raise the tolerance slowly until the background disappears, then stop. Around 20 suits a JPEG logo; 30–50 suits scans with uneven lighting.
- 4
Click Apply, then download as PNG or WebP — JPEG cannot store transparency and will put the background straight back.
Frequently asked questions
What does the tolerance slider actually do?
It sets how far a pixel’s colour may differ from the one you picked and still be removed. Low values catch only near-exact matches, which suits graphics exported from design software; higher values absorb the variation introduced by JPEG compression or uneven lighting on a scan. Push it too far and parts of your subject start disappearing.
Why is there a pale halo around my subject?
That is almost always tolerance set slightly too low. The edge pixels of a shape are blends of the subject and the background — a letter’s edge might be 60% white — so they sit just outside a tight threshold and survive as a fringe. Nudging tolerance up a few points usually clears it.
Why did it punch holes in my subject?
Either the tolerance is too high, or the colour you removed genuinely appears inside the subject. If a product photo has white highlights, keying out white will remove those too — the tool cannot tell one white from another. No tolerance value fixes that case.
How is this different from AI background removal?
Completely different approaches. This removes pixels by colour, which is fast and exact for flat backgrounds like logos and scans. AI removal segments a subject from a complex scene and is what you need for a person or product photographed against a real background — a job colour keying cannot do at all.
Which export format keeps the transparency?
PNG or WebP. JPEG has no alpha channel, so exporting to it flattens everything you just removed back onto white. In our measurements WebP was considerably smaller than PNG for transparent graphics while preserving the alpha channel fully.