Remove the background from a JPG

Which download to take depends on where the picture is going. A transparent PNG is for design work: slides, documents, layouts, print-on-demand. It opens everywhere and is heavy, often several megabytes for a phone photo. A transparent WebP is the same cut-out for the web, at a small fraction of the weight.

The third option is a JPG with a new solid background. It is what shop listings, application forms and profile pages mostly want: a small, universally accepted file with the subject on clean white or on a colour that matches the page. Choose the colour first and JPG appears in the format list.

The quality of a cut-out depends on how clearly the subject's outline is recorded, and JPEG compression attacks exactly that. At low quality the format leaves a halo of faint noise along every strong edge, and blurs fine strands of hair into the wall behind them. The model then has less to go on, and bits of the old background can cling to the outline.

The practical lesson is to use the original. A photo straight from the camera roll cuts out more cleanly than the same photo after a messaging app has reduced and recompressed it. If you can choose how the picture reaches you, ask for it as a file or a document and not as a chat image.

For selling online, three steps usually follow each other: remove the background, centre the product on a square, and bring the file under the shop's limit. The editor does the first two together. Set the background to white, choose a product canvas such as 2000 by 2000, and every photo in the batch comes out as a JPG with the product centred and an even margin. If the shop also limits the file size, take the downloads to the compressor on this site and enter the limit as a target size. Flat white costs almost nothing in a JPEG, so these files compress very well.