How to crop and remove background from an image

Thanks to online tools and solutions driven by artificial intelligence, it has never been easier to crop a photo to change the background or create emotes. Photoshop, remove.bg or Zyro, we explain how to do it with three tools.

Whether it is to create photomontages, to modify illustrations or to recover only a subject with a transparent background, it can be practical to crop an image to recover only the main subject. In this tutorial, we will offer you three solutions to easily crop your photos.

The photo that will serve as an example for the clipping

For each example, we will use the same image and try, as much as possible, to refine the result.

How to make a cropped image with Photoshop?

The first approach is the most precise, but also the most expensive, since it requires the use of Photoshop, available with the Adobe Photography license at 12 euros per month – or Creative Cloud at 62.47 euros per month.

The advantage of this method is to make it easy to select the subject to be cropped and to recover the image in its original format. To do this, here are the steps to follow:

Open your original image in Photoshop;
In the tool column, right-click on the selection tool;
Select the square object selection symbol;
Hover over the object or subject until it is highlighted in blue then validate with a left click;
Right-click on the image then ” invert selection» ;
In the layers panel, unlock the padlock next to your image;
Press the key “DELETEon your keyboard.

You can then reduce the size of the work area to adjust it to the object you have just clipped to reduce the place of the transparent background.

Select the object selection tool, then the subject to be cropped

All you have to do is click on file, then export and, finally,“quick export to PNG”.

The advantage of this formula is that you can precisely select the object you want to clip on your photo. Moreover, in the event of poor automatic detection of the contours of the object in Photoshop, you can modify the selection from the options bar using the “add to selection” And “subtract from selection“. All you have to do is frame the element or elements that you want to add or subtract from the final image so that they are taken into account in the final rendering.

How to quickly remove the background from an image on remove.bg?

In recent years, several websites have offered to automate the principle of clipping your photos. This is the case of the best known of them: remove.bg (for “remove background», «remove background“).

This website has the advantage of not requiring a particularly powerful computer and of being very easy to approach. Concretely, you just have to go to the web page in question, choose the image to upload and validate. That’s all. Automatically, the site will remove the background to keep only what it considers to be the main subject of the photo.

Once the first version offered by remove.bg, the site allows you to refine the result by erasing other elements of the photo or restoring them. It will also offer you several backgrounds into which you can integrate the clipped image.

The final render of remove.bg in 612 x 408 pixels

Where the rub is that remove.bg only allows the image to be downloaded in low definition, at best at 0.25 megapixels. To download the clipped image in high quality, up to 25 megapixels, you will necessarily have to go to the checkout. Each high definition image download will cost you a credit on the website. For 40 credits per month, count 9 euros, while 200 credits will cost you 39 euros each month. Without subscription, you can buy lots of 1, 10, 75 or 200 credits for 1.99 euros, 9 euros, 49 euros or 99 euros.

How to crop an image for free with zyro?

Faced with remove.bg, other Internet sites also offer you clipping tools. And unlike the industry leader, some do allow you to take advantage of this feature for free.

This is the case of zyro.com, a website specializing in publishing websites for individuals or businesses. In addition to its CMS tool, the site also offers a service for cropping photos.

As on remove.bg, zyro offers a simple interface with the possibility of uploading your image, then discovering the proposed clipping. However, zyro stops there and does not allow you to modify the final result by hand by adding or removing elements from the clipped version. Also impossible to integrate the clipped element on a background.