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Is there a 'magic' background removal tool?


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So I've spent ages researching (for many years!).

The answer: there NO magic tool. Background removing is an art and a time consuming tedious task that one needs to master. It's like becoming a monk, it can't be rushed.

But then last night, I came  across this website:  https://www.remove.bg!

OMG. I get some super clean cuts.

It's AMAZING.

But... it's JUST code.

Do we have something in Affinity Designer that will do the same?

Either a plugin or a setting?

The pictures I tested with had a fairly uniform background - like pale beige mostly.

Thanks.

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Have you tried the Smart Selection Brush Tool in the Pixel Persona?

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@Alfred

Thanks for the reply.

I have Affinity Photo.

I searched for Pixel Persona. Can't find.

After googling for a few minutes, it seems apparent that it's ONLY available in Affinity designer?

Am I missing something?

I've tried this website a few times now.

I'm blown away by the results.

I normally pay a freelancer something like £0.15 per image - cutting out background for images.

I normally shoot on a plain background like cream (but just need completely white) and give to the freelancer.

Somehow, the background ends up getting shadow gradients as well - which adds to to the complexity of removing the background.

I can cut out backgrounds just fine - give me 10 minutes per image and I do a fine job. Problem is when you have 100 images to edit - that becomes 1 thousand images!

Thanks.

 

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4 minutes ago, enginestar said:

I have Affinity Photo.

Alfred probably answered as he did because in your original post you asked if Designer had something to do it. The Pixel Persona is part of Designer.

In Photo you could use the Selection Brush, which is basically the same tool he mentioned for Designer.

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Thanks for the reply.

I just tried the Selection brush.

It's OK.

But not magic like this website!

Surely they can't be doing anything super complex hidden from the rest of the world!?

It's just got to be code at the end of the day!

The images I uploaded had a plain cream top with a bottom 10% that had flooring with a pattern on.

The website cut the images super clean.

There MUST be something everyone else is missing?

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Photoshop has a similar tool based on AI. I think that in the future a similar tool will go to Affinity

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It's a Google service and the results are Meh! on fairly complex images that Affinity Photo can handle. See image below for the no click result :S

Screen-Grab.png

 

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Result with a person in the image. 
Screen-Grab-1.png

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The advantage of graphics programs over such "one-click action" websites is that you can always correct the operation of algorithms  switching to another selection tool to correct errors.

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15 hours ago, mateuspollonio said:

Send me the image, pls i’ll Try with the website, photoshop and af photo

Here you are

 

druk.zip

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Took less than two mins including a bit a selection refining to bring in some fly away hair, I timed it lol!
Screen-Shot-2019-07-01-at-22-55-28.png

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Nice, in this picture it was not difficult because the background was out of focus. I usually use the "select subject" function in PS when I need to quickly cut the background in product photography. With more complex objects, it works worse but in every release of the application is getting better. As you can see in the second movie, the selection is not perfect but a minute correction is enough to get a very good result.

This function is useful for the initial selection, which can later be corrected. I could use this tool also in Affinity, I hope it will appear in the future.

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18 hours ago, firstdefence said:

Result with a person in the image. 

come on... that cut of the girl looks DAMN good.

Did you use the website or Photoshop?

My personal need: to cut out graphics from a plain background.

A complex image: would need a super program - but will never beat a human.

But for me... no need for a complex program!

I wish, I wish there was a one click solution in Affinity Photo.

I've searched around for code. I found some Python. I'll try and give that a  go.

 

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6 hours ago, enginestar said:

come on... that cut of the girl looks DAMN good.

Did you use the website or Photoshop?

I used the website on the girl in the bikini and I was impressed to be honest. That's why I ran the girl through, I thought the tree was a slightly unfair test. 

If the site is using AI, with enough people running trees through the AI will learn fast and will improve it's results, I'm surprised Google haven't already done this on the more complex images because it's those that people will ultimately want to run through to save time. 

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There is a Background Erase Brush in Affinity that works quite good if its just one colour you want to get rid of from the background, or you can select an area by Sampled Colour to be removed but i usually end up going into my Topaz ReMask plugin and that's usually a 30 second job.

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2 hours ago, firstdefence said:

If the site is using AI, with enough people running trees through the AI will learn fast and will improve it's results ...

That can happen only if there is some way for the site or app to learn how often it got it wrong & there is some way that info can be applied to converge on progressively better results.

Since this is not really 'artificial intelligence' but instead an application of state-of-the-art machine learning programming techniques, just massaging  the 'rightness' of the results into a machine usable form is still by itself a challenge so formidable that it takes a huge amount of time & processing power to do that much.

Distilling all that into something that can run locally in an app is even more challenging. To date, there has not been much success in doing that, other than for a few types of image content, most notably photos of one or a few people that stand out from the background.

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In Affinity Photo the background erase tool works very well, though you have to manually go through and erase the fine areas.  I used this tool to remove the background from some intricate 3D geometry and it was very easy to select the correct colors in tight spaces.  In my opinion this tool is the most accurate I have ever used for background removing.  Though it is not a one click and done for you tool.

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