
Remove.bg – A service to remove the background of any photo - August-Garcia
https://remove.bg
======
roel_v
Good marketing too, having made it to the front page here several times in
several weeks :)

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matthberg
Previously featured on Show HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601),

Really useful project, I think.

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kumarm
We do the same as Mobile apps:

iOS: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cut-copy-paste-
photos/id1126...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cut-copy-paste-
photos/id1126958019?mt=8)

Android:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.km.cutpast...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.km.cutpaste.util)

We use Image Segmentation with Deep Learning. Our Hair extraction is not as
good as theirs. We support Pets, Furniture, Vehicles Etc though.

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jbardnz
This is really cool but pricing for commercial images seems high. At work we
use pixelz.com which is an API for human image processing. They clear
cut/resize/rotate and recolor for around $0.60 per image. Results are
fantastic, we have around 1 in 1000 images that have to be sent for
reprocessing.

The only advantage I could see to using this is the instant turn around.

Edit: I was looking at the one off pricing. It looks like subscriptions are
really good value.

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ascorbic
That's 10 times the price of this service.

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saagarjha
Somewhat important to note, I think:

> The user may use the platform, which is available at remove.bg, exclusively
> for non-commercial purposes. This means that all results of the platform (in
> the following: the platform) may only be used for private purposes. Any use
> for (direct or indirect) commercial purposes is excluded.

~~~
SnowingXIV
Pricing seems fair though. I’d pay 1.99 for an image I needed to use this for
commercial use. To do this manually might take a tad longer and may not come
out as nice. I haven’t tried it yet but if it’s anything like the examples
seems great.

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epilogue
I agree, the single image pricing seems very fair. You could easily try it
using the non commercial service to check your happy with the outcome and
simply pay the 1.99 to license the image for one off use. Not forcing you to
sign up for a monthly plan or pay for multiple images at once as the lowest
tier is very smart in my opinion.

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frob
I find it interesting that the first image they choose to show on their page
to represent their product has an obvious flaw in it. For me, the image of the
woman in black overalls with a grey tshirt underneath is the first to show. If
you look under her right armpit, you can see that the grey lake is still there
and not the expected grey-and-white checkerboard. Maybe they're just trying to
be honest about the limitations of their product, but I assume this was an
accidental oversight. Obviously this is a part of the image that could be
easily fixed by (computer-aided) hand, but it might make more sense as a third
or fourth image if that is the point.

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SubiculumCode
The image on the front page changes all the time, so I am not sure which you
are talking about.

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derimagia
Here's the image:
[https://www.remove.bg/images/samples/combined/s1.jpg](https://www.remove.bg/images/samples/combined/s1.jpg)

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digitalboss
They do mention higher res output here Even higher quality with 4000 × 2500
pixels, or any other dimensions with up to 10 megapixels.

[https://www.remove.bg/pricing](https://www.remove.bg/pricing)

Image [https://www.remove.bg/assets/comparison-
hd-9b9708387758e42f0...](https://www.remove.bg/assets/comparison-
hd-9b9708387758e42f0a6b41f5ffb4c550a5ca6a2f20bc565aa2bfccf81f1d9a1a.jpg)

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RussianCow
What does that have to do with the flaw in the image on the home page?

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sergiotapia
Tried it on a family picture right in front of the castle of Disney's Magic
Kingdom, my family posing and tons of people walking around. The result is
incredible, this is really great!

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BadassFractal
How well does it work with hair? Hair is notoriously hard to select well in
Photoshop for most retouchers, so it would be amazing if the automation
somehow became better than professional humans doing the editing. There are a
ton of manual techniques out there for extraction, none of them work
incredibly well out of the box depending on the background you're working
with.

I found this class on hair retouching to be great btw, goes pretty in depth on
the latest techniques used in commercial-grade work:
[https://proedu.com/collections/available-
tutorials/products/...](https://proedu.com/collections/available-
tutorials/products/how-to-retouch-hair-in-photoshop-with-sef-mccullough-
advanced-commercial-techniques)

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aembleton
Just try it! It's free and quick.

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chias
This looks phenomenal to me, and I recommended it to a few photographer
friends of mine. They all felt the same way: yes this is super cool, but 10 MP
is far too low to use in any professional capacity (in particular when dealing
with photographs that would eventually be made into prints). It's cool for
social media and stuff, but not anything they'd be able to sell, and thus not
something they would pay for.

Currently the list of people I know who would pay for something like this is
identical to the list of people I know who would require higher resolutions
for it to be useful.

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sb8244
I tried out several different pictures and got pretty good accuracy... That's
impressive!

Biggest problem encountered was over correction with some foreground image
part removed

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caprese
popping in the resulting image back into photoshop and layer masking the
foreground back with the original image seems to be a quick fix

seems like this could save a lot of time.

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SubiculumCode
IO tried a pretty complex group picture, and it did great, except for a couple
of spots...a lot of time saved.

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nostalgiac
You can also press the edit button then remove/restore parts that it missed..
super handy.

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godzillabrennus
Magic Wand tool in Macromedia/Adobe Fireworks could do something like this
quickly years ago.

Is this really a big problem still today?

I'm not an avid photo editor these days.

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feverishaaron
The magic wand tool (or really any of the "modern" extraction tools in
Photoshop) can't handle hair the way they claim to do in those examples. If
this is truly done with non-manual work, it's incredibly impressive.

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preommr
Did you try it? I put in an image and got back a result way too fast for
someone to have done it manually.

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tirumaraiselvan
Incredibly useful tool. Very good domain name. Instant value delivered with
free plan. Technology looks great: took 5 seconds to get the output.

All the best.

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personlurking
Nice!

But when I click Edit to change the background color, then hit Save, the pop-
up window says "blob:" in the URL and that Safari Can't Open The Page (that's
with the pop-ups allowed option). If I go back to the initial results page, it
still shows the checkered background.

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PorterDuff
Any clue at all how much processing this takes? I don't doubt you could build
a salable product out of that that worked in real time, even if it took a big
rackmount box of FPGAs.

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SubiculumCode
You can upload an image. It spits it out in seconds.

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skilled
I have seen veteran videographers praise this tool. I can't wait until we get
more of these tools for optimizing photos/videos.

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dakshmiglani
This is so nostalgic, looking at this makes me remember the days when i
manually used to remove backgrounds from photos with Photoshop.

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jxramos
Impressive if that treatment with the hair is realistic as shown.

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czr
Some tests:

Easy:
[https://i.redd.it/dwi7jrmrwri21.jpg](https://i.redd.it/dwi7jrmrwri21.jpg) ->
[https://i.imgur.com/bQZXrAJ.png](https://i.imgur.com/bQZXrAJ.png) (Okay, but
doesn't mask shadows around the feet correctly)

Medium: [https://500px.com/photo/195143459/ximena-by-agata-
serge](https://500px.com/photo/195143459/ximena-by-agata-serge) ->
[https://i.imgur.com/kUdcvFo.png](https://i.imgur.com/kUdcvFo.png) (Okay; it
could have taken out a bit more background in some semitransparent sections of
hair)

Hard:
[https://i.redd.it/i7fn0fy89ma21.jpg](https://i.redd.it/i7fn0fy89ma21.jpg) ->
[https://i.imgur.com/WGM67XL.png](https://i.imgur.com/WGM67XL.png) (Fooled
with some false-positives, but still a good try)

Certainly not perfect, but definitely usable.

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sturmeh
Weirdly I've found it works a lot better on real photos and less well on CG or
doctored photos.

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caprese
okay HN so what doesn't it work on?

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dharmab
I tried a few cartoon images. Realistic styles (most of Avatar: The Last
Airbender, most of Ghost in the Shell) work well. Semi-deformed styles (Avatar
gag faces, Samurai Jack, The Simpsons) usually didn't work or resulted in
artifacting. Non-human cartoons (Spongebob, Adventure Time) never worked.

Some photographs which had low contrast between subject and background were
not as cleanly cut out. It was good enough that I wouldbe able to import the
mask as a starting point and clean up the edges manually.

Photographs in which faces were obscured where handled surprisingly well!

Would love to see this as a native feature of an image editor.

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lapnitnelav
Yeah, make a (PS/other image editors) plugin that shove it into the API and
return the mask that you can correct when needed, that seems the way to go.

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marviel
Is this just a high-res implementation of Deeplab?

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samirsd
i fucking love this

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OrgNet
Not very interesting if not open source

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pishpash
This is pretty cool. What's the guestimate on number of jobs killed?

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dorkstar
"No persons found: At the moment remove.bg only works for photos with at least
one person in them. Sorry – please select an appropriate image."

Might it be harvesting images for facial recognition?

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chrischen
It’s another way to say their models only segment human subjects at the
monent.

