Remove the background from a logo

Two kinds of logo, two kinds of job

A logo file with a background, a JPG someone emailed, a screenshot, an export with a white or coloured box behind it, only needs the box removed. The edges are clean, the colours are flat, and the result can be very good. A photo of a logo, on a sign, a van, a shirt or a business card, is harder: the lighting is uneven, the surface has texture, and the logo is often at an angle. getPNG handles both the same way, by finding the logo as the subject and fitting the edge to the real pixels at full resolution, but the photo needs more checking afterwards.

How to remove the background from a logo

1. Crop close first if the logo is small in a big photo. The model does best when the logo is clearly the main thing in the picture. getPNG does not crop, so use your phone's photo editor or any image editor.
2. Drop the image on this page.
3. Check the holes. The inside of an O, the gap in an A, the space between a symbol and the words: the background should show through all of them. Use the compare view and zoom in.
4. Check the edge on black and on white in the Background panel. Pull Edge shift below zero by a pixel if a rim of the old background shows.
5. Download PNG with the background set back to Transparent.

Where logos go wrong

Enclosed shapes. A model trained to find a subject sometimes keeps the background inside a closed letter as part of it. It is the most common fault on logos with a lot of lettering. Thin text. A small tagline under a bold symbol can lose strokes or keep a haze around them. A logo that is the same colour as its background, embossing, a white logo on a light wall, gives the model little to go on. For any of these, the honest answer is that a tracing tool does better than a background remover, because it separates by colour rather than by subject.

From transparent PNG to vector

A transparent PNG is right for slides, documents, email signatures and most websites at one size. A printer, a sign maker, an embroiderer or anyone scaling the logo up needs a vector: an SVG or a PDF that stays sharp at any size. getSVG, getPNG's sibling tool, traces a PNG into clean vector paths in the browser, with the same no-upload promise. Download the PNG here, then open it in getSVG's logo to vector. For a photo of a logo, this two-step route usually beats tracing the photo directly, because the background is already gone.

A logo on paper, a wall or a shirt, to a clean PNG and then a vector covers the whole route, including straightening a logo shot at an angle. If you work in Adobe's apps, removing a background in Illustrator explains which of its tools suits a logo and which does not.

The fringe around a logo

Flat logos show halos more than photos do, because their edges are sharp and their colours are solid, so any leftover pixel of the old background is easy to see. The fix is the same: shrink the outline by a pixel and check it on a colour opposite to the old background. White halos and jagged edges after a cutout explains why the rim is there at all.

Logos that are not public yet

Agencies and in-house designers handle logos under embargo all the time: a rebrand before launch, a client's artwork under an agreement. Most online removers upload the file to a server to process it. getPNG removes the background inside your browser tab, and nothing is sent anywhere. Is it safe to upload images to online tools? compares what the popular services say they do with uploads.