How do you remove the background from a photo?
Where every tool struggles
Hair, fur, glass, and anything semi-transparent. These are not solved by better software; they are genuinely ambiguous at the pixel level. A slightly tighter crop that avoids flyaway hair hides more imperfection than any algorithm fixes.
Motion blur is the other one. A blurred edge has no clear boundary to find, so the cutout will always look either cut-off or haloed.
The halo, and how to avoid it
A thin light or dark fringe around the subject is background pixels the tool kept. It becomes obvious the moment you place the cutout on a background of the opposite brightness — which is exactly when people notice it, after the work is finished.
Check the cutout against both a white and a black background before you use it. Thirty seconds of checking saves redoing it.
Shooting so the cutout is easy
If you control the photo, this is where the work belongs. Put distance between the subject and the wall so the background goes soft, avoid backgrounds that share the subject's colour, and use even light — a hard shadow behind the subject reads as part of them to an automatic tool.
Our iOS app for exactly this. Runs on your device — no account, no tracking.