macOS Remove Background Tips and Tricks

A new feature in macOS Ventura is the ability to copy the subject from an image or remove the background. You can use this in many different apps in a variety of ways. Learn how to make clean Contacts and social media pictures, replace the background of an image, create folder icons, and much more.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some tips and tricks for using the  Lift Subject Feature in macOS Ventura. 
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So macOS Ventura introduced the Lift Subject Feature, sometimes called Remove Background in different apps. This uses advanced machine learning on your Mac to grab the subject out of a photo and then be able to just take that image, without the background, and use it somewhere else. You can use it in all sorts of apps but let's start here in the Photos app. I'm going to go to this picture here that has a subject in it. To use this on the Mac all you need to do is bring up the Context Menu. You can do that using Control click, two-finger click on a trackpad or right click on the mouse, and you can that anywhere here in the photo. So I'm going to do that here to the left even though the subject is to the right. That brings up the Context Menu. I can see Copy as one of the items but under that Copy Subject. That will only be active if your Mac can actually pick out a subject in the photo. When you move your pointer over it notice how you get this outline that kind of moves around the outside of the subject. Then use Copy Subject and now you've copied just that part of the image. 
Now that you've copied it what can you do with it. Well, you can do many things like paste it into a document. So here I am in Pages and I'm just going to use Command V or Edit, Paste and it will paste just the copied subject. Notice the background is completely missing. Even this area right here is cutout. So I just get the subject not any of the background part of the image. Now this looks really well but it is not always perfect. It's not always going to grab exactly the right pixels for the subject. Sometimes it may grab some extra pixels. Sometimes it may leave out part of the subject. You can, of course, use a third party image editing app and finally cutout the image yourself. This is just a really quick way to do it that Apple has made available to us throughout macOS. 
Now let's say you want the copied subject as a new image. You can do that by using the Preview App. So I'm going to use Launchpad here and run Preview and then Preview has a File, New From Clipboard command. Since we have copied the subject to the clipboard using that or just Command N will create a new document and place just that subject in it. Now we can just use Command S or File, Save and we can save this. In order to keep the background transparency here you're going to want to save it in PNG format and make sure that alpha is checked. Alpha is the transparency layer. So I'll Save and there I've got my image. 
Now that you have a file there's a lot of other things you can do with it. For instance you can use this in Contacts. I can simply drag and drop this to a contact like that, and you can see how it goes into the mode here where I can now adjust it and put it as the contact's image. If that was my goal now I can throw away this file. You can, of course, use this as your icon or avatar in online social media as well. Most social networks allow you to drag and drop into the web browser to add an image to a post or to change your icon or avatar. But sometimes you can also paste an image in, meaning you can just do Copy Subject, go directly to posting, and then paste. 
Now what if you want to have this image back in the Photos App. Well you can do that with just drag and drop. So I can add this back in here and you could see it appears as my latest import. I can see it right here in Photos. It even remembers the transparency layer. 
Now you can do this right in other apps as well. For instance here I am in the Mail App and there's an image attached to this image. I can Control Click on it. Two-finger click or right click and then you see I can Copy Subject and then in Preview I do File, New From Clipboard. You could see how it works. Another place you can use this is in Safari. Any image that you're viewing on a webpage you can Control Click on that image and then go to Copy Subject. Now here in Preview I can do File, New From Clipboard and I'll get the result. Here you can also do it in Messages. But it is a little tricky. I've got a photo here that I received. If I Control Click on it you'll see Copy but not Copy Subject. However, Copy Subject works in Quick Look. Since you can use Quick Look to get larger views of your photos in Messages I can have this photo selected here and I hit the Spacebar. It brings it up in Quick Look and now I can Control Click on the image and I get Copy Subject. 
Quick Look is also the key to using this on Files. So I've got various files here and if I were to select one a quick way to get the subject is just to use the Spacebar to bring up Quick Look. Then with Quick Look I can Control Click, use Copy Subject, and now I've got just the elephant there and I can do New From Clipboard in Preview. 
Now one of the things you may want to do here is to take a subject from one photo and place them in another photo. So I've got this scene right here, I'll double click and open it up in Preview. Let's say I want to put the elephant here. I can now select the elephant, spacebar to bring up Quick Look, Control Click Copy Subject, and then back here in Preview I can Control V or Edit, Paste and now I've got the subject in here as another layer and I can resize by dragging the dots and place them where I want. 
Another way to do this is to open both images up in Preview. Preview also allows you to use Copy Subject but you won't find it if you Control Click on the image. As a matter of fact Control Clicking doesn't work in Preview. However, you can go to Tools and there is Remove Background. Lift Subject and Remove Background are the same thing and, in fact, you can even see the little outline halo around the elephant there from Lift Subject. But if I Remove Background you can see what it does. It is going to convert to PNG because it needs that for transparency and then it is going to take away the background. So that's actually changing the original image there. But now I can Copy with Command C, go to this image here, and Command V to Paste. 
Now what if we want to do that but using the photos in your Photos Library. So you can't do layer and pixel editing in Photos. You can only do adjustments. So we're going to need Preview to do this. But it is easy to take the background and the subject, combine them in Preview, and bring them back into the Photos App. So I want to select the background image I want to use here and go to Image, and I'm going to want to Edit With and I'm just going to use Preview. That's going to open up that image in Preview. Then I'm going to go back into Photos here. Go to the photo that has the subject. Control Click and select Copy Subject. Then I can exit out of that. Switch back to Preview and now I can Command V to Paste. So now I've got the subject in there. I can change the size of the subject and put the subject where I want, like that. Now, I can Save and if I go back into Photos here I can see there's the original photo and there is my new image with the subject. If I ever want to revert to the original photo I can go to Image, and then Revert to Original, or if I want to keep both I can go to Image and all the way down at the bottom I can Duplicate the photo. Now that I have a duplicate of if I can go to Image, Revert to Original and now I've got my original. I've got the duplicate that is the combined version of the subject and the background.
There are lots of other things you can do with this. For instance, it's easy to create custom folder icons using this. So I can select this folder here in the Finder. I'm going to use Command I to get info. Select the icon there and Command C to Copy. Then I'm going to use Preview again and go File, New From Clipboard. This is going to create a new icon file there. I don't want an icon file. I want an image file. So I'm going to select the first image in the icon file. Copy and then do New From Clipboard from that. Now I have a plain image file. I can get rid of this icon file here. Now I just need to add a subject to this. So back here in Photos I'll go into this photo again. I'll Control Click, Copy Subject, Return to Preview here and paste the subject in. I'm going to have to resize by dragging the dots here. Make it much smaller. When I get it to the size I want I just position it where I want, maybe something like that. Now I'll click on the background here to deselect that. Do Command A to select All. Command C to Copy. I'll go back here to the Info window for the folder. Make sure this is selected and Command V to Paste. Now you could see what the folder looks like. 
Now before I showed you how to Copy subjects and then Paste into Pages. But you can actually remove the background right inside of Pages. So I'm going to drag an image here from a file, but you can also drag from the Photos App. Place it into to here and now let's say I want to remove the background. You want to go to Format and then Image in the right sidebar. There's a Remove Background button. Now that's not new. But before if you click that you would have to then select a background color to remove it. That didn't work well if you had multiple colors in the background. In other words you had to have an object with a solid background, like a green screen or something, for it to work well. But now Remove Background will first use the Lift Subject Feature of Ventura only in Ventura. If you've got macOS Monterey or earlier it is just going to work as it did before. But now Remove Background does this. You can see how it gets rid of the background really easily. Plus, you're still in the mode here where you can add more to remove. In this case we don't need to. You can just click Done and we've got the elephant. But what about if we were to take this picture of a fox. Let's do Remove Background for that and you can see how it doesn't get it quite right. Now I can click in the background here and actually select more to remove. Like that. It's just as difficult to use as it was before. But it is one thing that you can do to more finely tune the removal. Then you click Done and I can keep working at that to get rid of more and more. 
Now you can also do the same thing in Preview but with better tools. So I'm going to double click to Open Up the fox here in Preview. We're going to go to Tools, Remove Background and it does the same thing as Pages is doing. So it gets the same result here. Now I can go to the Markup Tool Bar tools there and I can use various tools here. I do have the instant alpha there which is basically the same thing I was doing in Pages. But I also have the Smart Lasso and Lasso. So I can use the Smart Lasso here and outline the area I want to remove, like this, and let it make its best guess as to what to remove and I can hit Delete. I can also use regular Lasso and circle the area I want and Delete. I can zoom in and do it with even more precision. 
A better example might be this photo of giraffes. If I use Remove Background here it is going to keep both giraffes but maybe I just want this one. So now I can really easily go in here, use the Rectangular Selection Tool, and select one of these giraffes, delete, and now I just have this one remaining. I can even now select just this giraffe here and go to Tools, Crop, to crop the image just to this. Then when I Save it here you could see I have just that one giraffe. 
So there are a lot of creative uses for this. I think I'm really just scratching the surface here. You can use it in Numbers and Keynote as easily as you can do it in Pages. In Keynote presentations it could be particularly powerful for creating really good slides. So I hope you find this useful. I can think of even more ideas of how to use this. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 14 Responses to “macOS Remove Background Tips and Tricks”

Dee

2 years ago

Excellent tutorial Gary! This feature alone is a good reason to upgrade to Ventura.

Willem den Hartog

Hi Gary. Copy the map icon to preview is not going to work in my situation. It must be okay but in Ventura with my Macbook Pro 14" What am i doing wrong, you think?

Gary Rosenzweig

Willem den Hartog: Not sure what you are trying to do. What do you mean, exactly, by "the map icon." Map icon from where? What are you selecting to copy, exactly?

Ron

Creative and helpful, Gary; thanks!

John R

I've used the new silhouette tool in Ventura, but did not realize all the new menu selections. Thanks to your thorough tutorial I do now. Appreciate you sharing this knowledge.

I ment from point 7:40 in the video. Copying the map icon in info isn't possible for me. The clipboard stays empty. So it's also impossible to copy the icon to preview.

Willem den Hartog: So you select a folder in the Finder. You use Command+i to Get Info. Then you click on the icon in the upper left corner (do you see it selected with a halo?) Then you use Command+C to copy. Then in Preview you use File, New From Clipboard. That doesn't work? Maybe try another folder? What is the word "map" referring to in your queries?

I did exactly what you showed in the video. In Preview New from Clipboard was not possible (greyed out). I started to make a new blanco map in Desktop that I used for this. In Info the icon was selected with a halo. Tried diferent maps. None of them did what you showed us. I could change the complete map icon in Info but thats something completely different.

Willem den Hartog: Still no getting what you mean by "maps." Try it with a FOLDER icon to test. Your last sentence is also confusing to me.

Sorry I'm from the Netherlands and indeed our map is a folder to you. So Map=Folder. When I use Command+i and select the folder icon (the halo appears) then I can exchange the icon for just another smal png picture. But thats not what you did. You kept the Folder image and used an other image on top of the Folder image. That what I can't do because it's impossible for me to use "New from Clipboard" inn Preview.

Willem den Hartog: Ah, OK. So map=folder. Sorry, but I don't know why File, New From Clipboard isn't working for you when you copy a folder icon like that. Should be standard basic functionality. I've never seen it not work.

Think I found the problem because I know can do it correctly. I fooled around a bit with Preview to check copy and new from Clipboard. Seems that Preview was hangin' somewhere or so. Luckily it's unlocked now and can I produce a Folder icon with any picture I like. Thanks for putting me on track of my issue.

Joe Grillo

Why am I getting a gray and white background when I remove the background

Joe: Need more details. Which app are you using and which command to remove the background? By gray and white do you mean a checkerboard pattern?

Comments Closed.

macOS Remove Background Tips and Tricks

Comments: 14 Responses to “macOS Remove Background Tips and Tricks”

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