A transparent background lets a logo, signature or product photo sit cleanly on any colour, with no white box around it. Getting one takes two things: removing the background, and saving in a format that can store transparency.
Which formats support transparency?
| Format | Transparency | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| PNG | Yes | Soft, partly see-through edges too. The safe choice. |
| WebP | Yes | Like PNG, but usually much smaller. |
| AVIF | Yes | Small files, but fewer apps can open it. |
| SVG | Yes | For logos and icons drawn as shapes. |
| GIF | On or off | A pixel is either fully see-through or fully solid, so edges look jagged. |
| JPG | No | Transparent areas are always filled with a colour. |
If a transparent image turns white or black somewhere, it has almost certainly been saved or converted as a JPG along the way.
If the background is a plain colour
Logos, signatures, icons and product shots on a white backdrop are the easy case. Use Remove White Background:
- Drop the image in. White is removed by default; you can pick black or any other plain colour instead.
- Keep Only remove background touching the edges ticked. This removes the background around your subject but keeps white parts inside it, such as the inside of a letter or the white of an eye.
- If a faint haze of background is left, raise Tolerance a little. Scans and photos are rarely pure white, so they need a higher setting than a digital file.
- Save as PNG, or as WebP for a smaller file.
The tool also takes the background colour out of the soft edge pixels. That avoids the thin white fringe you often see when a logo on white is placed on a dark background.
If the background is busy
Cutting a person or an object out of a room or a street scene needs a tool that recognises the subject, usually with AI. Removing a colour can’t do that, because the background has many colours and some of them also appear in the subject. For those photos, use a dedicated subject-cutout tool, then come back here to resize or convert the result.
Checking the result
On this site, transparent areas are shown as a grey-and-white checkerboard. Most image viewers do the same. If you see a checkerboard around your subject, the background is transparent.
Some websites and apps put transparent images on a white or black background when they display them. That’s their choice of display colour; the file itself is still transparent.
Related jobs
- Rounded Corners gives an image rounded corners, or cuts it into a circle, with transparent corners.
- SVG to PNG turns an SVG logo into a transparent PNG at any size.
- PNG to WebP makes a transparent PNG much smaller for a website, keeping the transparency.