How to make an image background transparent and save it as a PNG
Transparency is not a look, it is a fourth channel in the file. A PNG stores red, green, blue and alpha, and alpha is what tells every other program which pixels to draw and which to leave alone. If you are trying to put a logo on a coloured slide, or a product on a white listing page, this is the channel you need — and it is the one that quietly gets thrown away if you save the wrong format.
JPG cannot do it. That is the whole problem.
A JPG has no alpha channel at all. If you cut a background out and then save as JPG, the transparent area is filled in — usually white, sometimes black — and the transparency is gone for good. This is the single most common way people lose a good cut-out. PNG and WebP both carry alpha; PNG is the safe default because everything from PowerPoint to a print shop understands it.
Getting the alpha in the first place
You need something that decides, per pixel, what is subject and what is background. A manual selection works and is exact but slow. A segmentation model does it in a second and is approximate at the edges. Cutout uses the second approach and runs the model in your browser: drop the image on the page, and it gives you back the same picture with the background pixels set to alpha zero. Nothing is uploaded — the file is read straight into the tab.
Checking that your transparency is real
Open the PNG and put it against two different backgrounds — a white one and a dark one. If the subject sits cleanly on both, the alpha is real. If a white box appears around it on the dark background, what you have is a white rectangle, not transparency, and something in the chain flattened it. Cutout shows the result on a checkerboard, on white and on black for exactly this reason: you can see the answer before you download.
Keeping it transparent after you save
Two things flatten a PNG after the fact. Saving it again through a tool that defaults to JPG, and pasting it into an app that composites onto a white page before exporting. Keep the PNG as your master, and export copies from it rather than re-editing the export. If a service asks for a JPG, give it a JPG made from the PNG — but never let the JPG become the only copy you have.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my transparent image have a white background?
It was almost certainly saved as a JPG at some point, or exported by a tool that composites onto white. JPG has no alpha channel, so the transparency cannot survive that step. Re-export from the PNG.
Is WebP or PNG better for transparency?
Both carry alpha. WebP files are smaller, PNG is understood by more software — including older office and print tools. Use PNG when the file is going somewhere you do not control.
Does the PNG keep my original resolution?
It should. Cutout returns the cut-out at the size you put in, up to about 4000 pixels on the long side, above which it scales down so the browser does not run out of memory.
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