Change the background colour of a photo

How to change a background colour

1. Drop the photo. The AI cuts out the subject and shows it on blue to start with.
2. Pick a colour in the Background panel, which sits at the top on this page: White, Black, Mint, Sky, or the last swatch, which opens a colour picker for any exact colour.
3. Try a few. Changing the colour is instant, because the cutout is made once. Edge shift and Feather are instant as well.
4. Download. JPG for a photo on a solid colour, PNG for artwork or text, WebP where it is accepted. The file keeps the size of the original.

Which colour works for what

Grey is the safe choice for headshots and team pages. A mid grey flatters most skin tones, keeps contrast with both dark and light hair, and does not fight with a website's own colours. Blue, muted rather than bright, reads as calm and corporate and is common on LinkedIn and conference speaker pages. Black is dramatic and makes colourful products and light subjects glow, but it swallows dark hair and dark clothes, so check the outline against it before you commit. White suits catalogues and profile pictures shown on white pages; the white background page starts on pure white.

Bright colours are for attention: a YouTube thumbnail, a sale banner, an Instagram story. A saturated background that is the opposite of the subject's main colour on the colour wheel, orange behind a person in blue for example, is the simplest way to make someone stand out at thumbnail size. A YouTube thumbnail with a cutout goes further, and professional headshot backgrounds covers faces in depth.

Using an exact brand colour

The last swatch in the Background panel opens your system's colour picker. On most systems you can type a hex value such as #1F6FEB directly, or pick a colour from the screen. The file is saved on exactly that colour, which matters when a set of photos has to match a website or a slide template. Keep a note of the value: getPNG does not remember it between visits.

Profile pictures and headshots

A consistent colour behind every photo is what makes a team page look like one shoot even when the photos were taken in ten different offices. The same trick works for your own profiles: one colour on LinkedIn, Slack and a conference badge makes you recognisable across all of them. The LinkedIn profile picture guide covers the background together with the crop and size, and profile picture backgrounds covers Discord, Slack and gaming avatars, including which of them keep transparency.

getPNG changes the background but keeps the photo's own shape, so crop to a square afterwards if the platform asks for one. Most profile upload forms let you crop while uploading.

When the edge shows against the new colour

A new colour exposes what the old background left behind: a pale rim from a white wall shows on black, a dark rim from a dark room shows on white. Move Edge shift one pixel below zero, and add a pixel of Feather if the outline looks too hard. Hair is where it shows most, because single strands are partly the old background. A mid-tone colour close to the brightness of the original background hides the most. White halos and jagged edges explains why.

Every step happens in your browser. The photo is not uploaded, so you can try twenty colours on a photo of a client, a child or an unreleased product without it ever reaching a server.