Does the image stay on my device?
Yes. Upload, local subject cutout, preview, and export all stay in the browser, so your image is never sent to a server.
Will every image cut out perfectly?
No browser-side cutout tool is perfect on every source. Clear subjects, simpler backgrounds, and cleaner edges usually give the strongest result.
What format does it export?
It exports a transparent PNG with alpha, so the cutout drops cleanly into other designs, documents, and upload flows.
Is it free to use?
Yes. The Transparent Background Maker is free with no signup and runs entirely in your browser.
How does the tool decide what should be transparent?
It runs a MODNet matting model locally through transformers.js and keeps whatever the model calls foreground. There is no colour rule and no tolerance slider, so it is not choosing 'the white pixels' or 'the pixels around the edge'. It is predicting a subject. That is why an image with two plausible subjects, for example two people at different depths, can return a result you did not expect.
My PNG has a transparent background but it still shows white. Why?
Almost always the file was converted or re-saved somewhere along the way. JPEG has no alpha channel, so any pipeline that touches JPEG puts a solid background back, and a lot of upload flows and chat apps convert on the way in. Other common causes are pasting into an app that flattens onto a white artboard, and a document viewer that composites onto white for display.
Can I check that the file really is transparent?
Yes, and it is worth doing. The status panel reports the source transparency percentage before the run and the ready state after it, so you can see how much of the exported image is fully clear. For a second opinion on the file itself, the PNG background tester and the image transparency checker report transparent, translucent, and opaque pixel counts.
Does anything get sent to a server?
No. The image is decoded in the tab, the model runs inside a Web Worker on your machine, and the PNG is generated from a local canvas. This is the real difference from most large background-removal sites, which upload your file and process it on their hardware. The only network request here is the one-time download of the model weights, which the browser then caches.
Is the transparent PNG bigger than the original?
Often yes, and that is expected. PNG is lossless, so a photographic subject stored as PNG can easily be several times larger than the JPG you started from. Keep the transparent PNG as the master, and export a compressed copy for the web only after the subject has been placed on its final background.