Taking the background off a photo is one of the things we do most in He.art: a product shot for a shop, a person for a poster, a pet to drop into a new scene. It takes one press, and the original is never touched. Here is how it works, step by step.
One photo, in Heart Photos
Sign in to Heart Photos and open the image. Press Photo info (the button at the top, or the I key) to open the panel at the side, and scroll to Studio. The first button there is Remove background.
Press it and a note says "Removing the background". The job goes straight into the queue in the corner of the page, so you can keep browsing while it runs. When it is done, the note says "Background removed" and the new image opens.
You can do this on any image you can see: your own, or anyone's public image. The original stays exactly as it was. What you get is a new image in your own library, a PNG with real transparency, named after the original with "no background" on the end and tagged Background removed. Its panel says which image it came from, so you can always find your way back.
Where it goes, and who can see it
If you were inside one of your own galleries, the cut-out lands in that gallery right beside the photo it came from. Anywhere else, Show in the corner opens it among the photo's related images.
Who can see it follows the photo you started from:
- From your own public photo, the cut-out is public too.
- From someone else's public photo, it is unlisted: yours, and seen only by people you give the link to.
- From a private photo, it is private.
You can change any of that afterward, as with any image of yours.
Already done? It says so
If you remove the background of the same photo a second time, Heart Photos does not make you wait for the same answer again. It hands back the cut-out you already have, at once, with the note "Already in your library", and opens it.
A whole gallery at once
On Premium and Max, your own galleries have a Remove backgrounds button in the row of buttons at the top of the gallery, just after Official gallery. It counts first and asks before it starts: how many photos, how many credits, and how many you have left. Photos that already have their background removed are skipped, and it takes up to 300 at a time. Each cut-out arrives in the gallery beside its photo.
What it costs
Each cut-out uses one credit. The Free plan comes with 50 credits a month, and the paid plans with more; the pricing page lists them. On Premium and Max, once your credits run out, a cut-out still goes ahead in Relax mode: it costs nothing and waits until the graphics card is free.
In He.art's Photo studio
The same Remove background is in He.art too. Open Photo studio in the sidebar, press Work from a photograph to pick one of yours (or Upload one, or just drop or paste an image onto the page), and press Remove background on its card. This one is offered on your own photos.
Photo studio is also where a cut-out becomes the start of something new. With the cut-out in hand, write what you want around it and press Create: the model draws from what is left, and that is filed as another new image, tagged Made by AI.
Tidy it up afterward
A cut-out often has a lot of empty space around the subject. Open it, go to Studio again, and press Trim borders: it trims the see-through edge right down to the subject. It is one of the twelve quick edits beside Remove background, and none of them use credits.
How it is made
The work runs on a graphics card in our own house, with BiRefNet, an open model under the MIT license. Two versions of it look at every photo: one is good at the soft edges of hair and fur, the other at the shape of the whole body, and the cut-out is worked out from both. Then a few checks clean up what models often get wrong: a see-through crack through solid hair where two heads meet is mended, and something behind the subject, like a chair, either comes out whole or goes whole, never sliced along an arm.
Try it
Open Heart Photos, sign in, pick a photo with a clear subject, and press Remove background. Then take the cut-out into He.art's Photo studio and give it a new world to stand in.