The short answer
Drop your image onto the tool below. It finds the most common color along the edges, usually white, and makes it transparent starting from the borders. Look at the preview on the checkerboard. If a thin light line remains around the shapes, raise Tolerance a little. If white parts inside the design must also disappear, such as the holes in letters, switch Remove to All matching pixels. Then choose PNG and press Download.
If the background is not white but another plain color, click on it in the preview. The color you click becomes the one that is removed, and with Connected area only the region you clicked is affected.
Try it here: Remove White Background
Open the full tool pageWhy a white background is not transparent
White is a color like any other: every white pixel stores red, green and blue at full strength. Transparency is a separate value per pixel, the alpha channel, which says how much of what is behind the image shows through. JPG has no alpha channel at all, so a logo saved as JPG always has a background, even if it looks empty on a white page. Put it on a colored slide or a dark website and the white box appears.
To get rid of it, the white pixels have to be turned into transparent ones and the result has to be saved in a format with alpha: PNG, which every program accepts, or WebP, which is smaller and works in all current browsers. GIF only knows fully transparent or fully solid pixels, which gives jagged edges, so it is not a good choice for this.
Connected area or all matching pixels
The tool can decide in two ways which white pixels belong to the background, and choosing the right one solves most problems.
- Connected area works like a paint bucket. It starts from the edges of the image, or from the point you clicked, and spreads only through neighboring pixels of the same color. White areas enclosed by the design stay: the eyes of a mascot, a white star on a blue badge, the white text in a red button.
- All matching pixels removes every pixel close to the chosen color, wherever it is. Use it for text and line art, where the background shows through the inside of letters like O, A, B, D, P and R and through gaps in outlines. Without it those small enclosed areas stay white.
| Image | Best setting | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Logo with white parts inside | Connected area | Inner white is part of the design |
| Black text or signature | All matching pixels | Holes in letters must be clear |
| Icon on a white square | Connected area | Only the outer square goes |
| Line drawing, stamp, scan | All matching pixels | Background shows between lines |
Tolerance and JPG files
In a PNG made by a design program the background is usually perfectly white. A JPG is different: its compression creates slightly gray and slightly colored pixels around every edge and sometimes faint blocks in flat areas. With a tolerance of zero these pixels stay and form a dirty outline.
Tolerance sets how far a pixel may differ from the chosen color and still count as background. For clean PNGs 5 to 15 is enough, for JPG logos 15 to 30. Raise it step by step and watch the preview: when light parts of your design such as a pale yellow or light gray start to disappear, you have gone too far. Edge softness blends the border between design and transparency over a few pixels so curves do not look jagged; 1 or 2 is right for most logos, 0 keeps hard pixel edges for pixel art and tiny icons.
Halos: the white line on dark backgrounds
The edge pixels of a design are a mix of the design color and the background, which is what makes curves look smooth. When the background is removed, those mixed pixels keep a bit of white in them, and on a dark background they show up as a thin light outline, called a halo.
The tool removes that leftover white from every half transparent edge pixel, calculating the color the pixel would have had without the white behind it. To check the result, set Preview on to Black. If you still see a light line, raise Tolerance or Edge softness slightly. A clean result on black will also look clean on any other color.
When to use the AI background remover instead
This method works when the background is one flat color. Photos are different: the wall behind a person has light and shadow, a product shot on a table has reflections and gradients, and hair has thousands of fine strands. A color based removal either leaves half of such a background or eats into the subject.
For photos of people, animals and products, use the AI Background Remover, which recognizes the subject itself. For logos, icons, clip art, scans, signatures and screenshots of interface elements, the color based tool on this page is faster, keeps thin lines and small text intact and gives a predictable result.