How to Cut Out an Object from a Photo in One Click (AI, Free)
If you grew up doing photo edits the hard way, the pen tool is muscle memory: click, click, click around the silhouette, refine the path, mask, hide the background. Twenty minutes for a clean cutout of a person against a busy scene.
The pen tool isn't dead exactly, but for 90% of cutouts it's overkill now. AI segmentation models — the same kind of tech that powers self-driving car perception and medical imaging — can do the job in three seconds and the result is usually indistinguishable.
Here's how to do it.
The fastest path
- Open AI Pass Canvas
- Drag your photo onto the canvas, or paste it (Cmd-V)
- Click the photo to select it
- Open the radial menu and tap Cut out
- Wait ~3 seconds
A new layer appears with a transparent background. The original photo gets hidden so you can see the cutout clearly. If you want both back, toggle the eye icon on the original layer.
What you get
The result is a real PNG with a true alpha channel. You can:
- Drag it onto a different colored background
- Paste another photo behind it
- Export it directly as a transparent PNG
- Use it as a sticker, an avatar, a product photo
Why the edges are clean
Behind the scenes, Canvas's Cut out routes to BiRefNet v2 (heavy) — a binary refinement network trained specifically for cutouts on hard real-world photos. It handles:
- Hair (the classic cutout-killer — strands and flyaways come through)
- Fur, feathers, motion blur on edges
- Semi-transparent things (glass, smoke, sheer fabric)
- Subjects against busy or low-contrast backgrounds
The cheap free remove-bg tools you may have used a few years ago used a much simpler model and produced harsh, jagged edges around hair. This is a real generational improvement.
What it costs
Cutout is one of the cheapest AI operations on AI Pass — about $0.02 per image. Your $1 signup credit covers ~50 cutouts before you'd ever need to top up.
If you do this once a week, you'll never spend more. If you're an Etsy seller doing 50 listings tomorrow, that's exactly $1 of credit gone.
Edge cases to know
- Multiple subjects in the photo: the cutout extracts everything that looks "foreground" — sometimes that's two people, sometimes one. Crop the photo to just one subject first if you want a single cutout.
- Subject very close in color to background: AI struggles when contrast is genuinely low (white shirt against white wall). Manual masking still wins here.
- Editorial-quality cutouts for print: for billboard / magazine work, hand-mask. For everything else — listings, social, presentations — AI is enough.
Compare to the alternatives
| Tool | Cost | Edge quality | Sign-up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Photoshop pen tool | $20/mo + 20 min/photo | Best | Yes (Adobe) |
| remove.bg | $9/mo (or per image) | Good | Yes |
| AI Pass Canvas Cut out | $0.02/image | Very good | $1 free credit on signup |
| Free GIMP plugins | Free | Mixed | Download required |
Try it
Open Canvas, drop in a photo, tap Cut out. The first one is on the house — your $1 signup credit covers 50 of these.