Lose the background. Keep the subject.

Until this week, a die-cut sticker of your dog, your product or your mascot started with homework. The cut line follows the edge of the artwork, so the artwork had to arrive with the background already gone: a transparent PNG from Photoshop, a Canva subscription, a remove-the-background website that wanted your email and your image. Most people don't have any of that. They have a photo.

So the builder does it now. Upload the photo as it is, press Remove BG under the preview, and a few seconds later the subject is on its own, the cut line is hugging its outline, and the price is already updated. That's the whole instruction.

What actually happens when you press it

A segmentation model — the same kind of thing behind the background remover in the big design apps — looks at the picture and decides what the subject is. Everything else goes. Then we clean the result up: faint haze the model wasn't sure about is cleared, stray specks of background are dropped, and pinholes in the subject are filled, so what reaches the cutter is one clean shape rather than a cloud of confetti.

The part we're proudest of is where it runs: in your browser, on your own device. Your photo doesn't go to a server to be processed. It doesn't go anywhere at all until you place an order, and even then only the file you chose to send. The first time you use it your browser downloads the model, which is about the size of a short video, and keeps it. After that it's instant to start. On a desktop the cutout takes a second or two; on a phone, which is doing the same work with less to do it with, it can take a while longer, and the button spins while it does.

It's free. Not free-for-three-images, not free-with-a-watermark. There's no per-image cost on our side because there's no server doing the work, so there's none on yours.

Two removers, one button

A logo saved as a JPG is a different problem from a photo. It's a clean shape on a white rectangle, and the right tool for that isn't a model guessing what the subject is — it's knocking out exactly the white that touches the edge, and nothing inside. The builder can tell the difference. Upload a logo on white and Remove BG does the exact version, so a white highlight inside your design stays put and the counter of an O stays white. Upload anything else and it does the model version.

Nothing happens until you press the button, and pressing it again puts the original back. If the exact version wasn't what you meant — a product shot on a white studio backdrop with soft shadows, say — there's a link to try the model instead.

Where it earns its keep

Pets and people. The most-ordered die-cut sticker is a face, and a phone photo is now enough to make one.

Products. A packet on a desk becomes a packet-shaped sticker. Good for packaging, sample bags and the swing tags nobody wants to design.

Mascots and characters that only exist as a screenshot or a flattened export.

Corflute cutouts. The same button lives in the corflute builder, and there it does something extra: once the background is gone, the board switches itself to a custom shape cut, so the life-size standee or the logo cutout is priced and shaped from the photo in one step. More on custom-shape corflute here.

How to get a clean edge

The model is very good and not magic, and the difference between a clean cutout and a rough one is mostly the photo you give it.

Crop close. The model decides what "the subject" is from the whole frame. A dog filling the picture gets a clean mask. A dog in the corner of a wide shot of the park, next to a bench and a bin, gets a guess. Crop before you upload, or zoom in on the phone before you take the picture.

Use the biggest version you have. A thumbnail saved from a search result is a few hundred pixels wide; the edge it produces is soft because the edge it was given was soft. The original from the camera roll is better every time.

Contrast helps. A subject that's a different colour from what's behind it separates cleanly. A black cat on a black couch is a hard problem for anyone, including us.

Then check the cut line. The preview shows exactly where the blade will go. If a wisp of fur or a strap makes the outline fiddly, the Border slider adds a white keyline around the whole shape, which smooths the cut and, honestly, looks better on most stickers anyway.

What it won't do

It will not read your mind about what the subject is, and it's hit-and-miss on the genuinely hard cases: wispy hair against a busy background, glass and reflections, two things overlapping, a scene with no obvious subject at all. When it misses, press the button again to restore the original and send us the file as it is. A person looks at every order before it's printed, draws cut lines for a living, and will fix it by hand on the free proof. The remover is there to save you the homework, not to replace the human.

The rest of the builder

The background remover is the new part, not the only part. Once the art is in, you can drag it, scroll to zoom, rotate it, snap it to Fit, Fill or Centre, type an exact size and keep the artwork's proportions, set the die-cut border from nothing to chunky, and switch between eight finishes with the price changing as you go. Then a proof, from a person, before anything is printed. Everything the builder does is on one page here.

Or skip the reading: open the builder, drop in the worst-lit photo on your phone, and press the button.