Remove the white background from an image

Logos, signatures and scans

A colour key works best on artwork: a logo exported on white, a signature photographed on paper, a scanned stamp or an icon saved as JPG. Those images have a clean, flat background, and removing one colour gives a sharper, more faithful edge than an AI model trained on photos.

• Signatures. Sign on plain white paper in dark ink, photograph or scan it in good light, then raise the tolerance until the paper’s shadows are gone (often 15 to 25%). Tick Crop to the content to get just the signature, ready to place in a document with sign PDF.
• Logos with white inside. Text and shapes often have white parts, such as the inside of an O or a white star. With Keep enclosed areas ticked, only background connected to the edge of the picture is removed and those parts stay white.
• JPG artefacts. JPG compression leaves faint off-white specks around edges. A tolerance of 8 to 15% with some edge softness usually clears them without eating into the artwork.

Getting clean edges

Edges are where a colour key usually goes wrong: hard cut-outs look jagged, and soft pixels keep a pale halo when you place the result on a dark background. Here the pixels in the softness band are made partly transparent and have the background colour taken out of them, the same idea as the “colour to alpha” filter in GIMP. Check the result by zooming into the preview over the checkerboard.

If the background has a gradient, a shadow or a texture, no single colour describes it. Try Colour at the edges with a higher tolerance, or crop away the problem area first with crop image.

Why PNG

JPG has no transparency, so the result is always a PNG. It is compressed losslessly, so it may still be larger than the original JPG; that is normal for images with transparent areas. PNGs with transparency can be used on websites, in Word, PowerPoint, Google Docs, Canva and most design apps.