With everyone getting in on the Internet commerce game in 2020, especially after lockdown, it’s only a matter of time before you take it to the next level and start getting serious about how you present photos of your wares. Also, in the general social media milieu, it’s also common after a certain point to start getting serious about presenting yourself. Part and parcel of that is not showing pictures with bits of your unkempt household or undesirable clothing in the background. That is deemed unprofessional (or merely too much information), and if you want to be taken seriously and sell some goods, it’s time to get good at editing your backgrounds. This is where a time-saving tool like BgEraser comes in. You can use it to cut photo backgrounds with artificial intelligence.
What is it?
BgEraser is an online graphics tool that uses AI to detect and cut photo backgrounds. This is not just a selection tool like a magic wand. It is an intelligent tool which detects people and products in an image and does the work to figure out which pieces of the image are products or people and which are unnecessary background. After processing, you are presented with an image which is a transparent PNG of your image with the background knocked out. That’s the theory. In practice, this background eraser does an amazing job of separating background and foreground and making you a usable image that you can use in your commerce and social media work. Let’s take a closer look.
Cut Photo Backgrounds
In essence, this is a very simple one-job tool. First, upload an image or images. Press the Start button, the images are processed, and the background is replaced with transparency. Regardless of the file format you uploaded, you can download a PNG file to enable you to retain the transparency. You can use the file in a layer of a graphics program and put other things behind the subject, such as patterns, flat colors, whatever you like. That’s literally all there is to this background eraser tool. Obviously, it does much better with sharp images and images where the subject is not a very similar color to the background. It’s expecting a lot of the AI if the subject and the background are the same color – even a human couldn’t pick that out. However the test images, some supplied by the developer and some of our own, were most impressive. Yes, there was on times a thin halo of dark pixels around the lighter subject images, and while that’s not perfect, it’s not horrible. In fact, in most cases it helps to integrate the subject with its new background, especially if it’s dark. If you add the image to a graphics program and start putting images in as a background, you soon see how it works. Take my bird picture, which I didn’t edit for contrast deliberately. Obviously perfection is only really obtainable by manual masking of the shape by drawing around it. This is VERY time-consuming, and if you have to pop the background out of 30 images for your ecommerce pages, then that could prove incredibly tedious. Of course, the higher resolution the images the finer and more invisible that line becomes. For professional users with high volumes of images, it then makes sense to process images at high res and then batch convert them to screen resolution for ultimate quality. But as you can see, if you look closely, this original image was really uncontrasty and BgEraser still did a pretty good job. It meshes with the new background layer well. A tiny bit of manual touchup is all that’s required to make this really sharp. Considering the price and what you get, this is a massive time-saver. Even for casual users, this is a great technology for saving time and upping your professionalism in the presentation of your imagery. Plus, the more time you save processing images, the more time you can spend selling products or enhancing your social media profile.
Where to get it
BgEraser is available online and free to cut photo backgrounds without signing up by staying within certain limits. The files must be less than 2Mb, width and height must be less than 700×700, and only file extensions .jpg, jpeg, and png can be used. You can sign up for a free account and up those limits raise to 5Mb and 2000×2000. At a Pro level for a modest monthly fee you can lift those limits to images over 2000 pixels. There are three price bands for super high res images: $5 gives you 50 images a month, $9.99 gives you 199 images a month and finally $29.99 gives you a colossal 999 images a month. If your needs are small or large, the service is scalable. Also, if you need more improvement in your photo-editing skill, check out how to add a watermark without Photoshop and crop images in Photoshop.
