The Best AI Background Remover Tools to Streamline Your Book Design Process

You found a good character image for your book cover, but the background belongs in a completely different book.

An AI background remover can cut out the subject so you can put it over a different background. For a still cover image, remove.bg is a simple place to start; Unscreen is for video and GIFs.

The cutout is only part of the job.

I used to place hundreds of tiny dots around a character to cut them out manually. Automatic background removal makes that part much easier, but you can still end up with a cover that looks like crap if the character doesn’t belong in the new scene.

best online background remover tools

Start with the picture you actually want to use. A tool that does a great job on a product photo might leave a mess around your character’s hair (which you’ll notice immediately once you put a dark background behind it).

These are the options worth comparing from this list. You don’t need accounts with all of them.

remove.bg

remove.bg has a simple job: remove the background from a photo. If you already have your character and just need to cut them out, start here rather than getting distracted by a whole new design app.

Look closely at what it kept, especially around the hair and clothing. Fast is useful, but the result still needs to work on your cover.

YouCam Perfect

YouCam Perfect is a mobile option for removing or replacing photo backgrounds. That makes it a reasonable one to consider if you’re already working on your phone.

But judge the finished image at the size you’ll actually use it. Looking good on a small screen isn’t much help if the edges fall apart when you enlarge the character.

Removal.AI

Removal.AI combines background removal with an image editor. That may save some moving back and forth if you want to make adjustments after cutting out the subject.

Having more editing options doesn’t mean you need to use all of them.

Kittl and Colorcinch

Kittl includes background removal alongside its design templates and graphics. Colorcinch also combines a background remover with editing tools and artistic filters.

These make more sense if you want to keep working inside the same tool. Don’t choose a background remover because it has a ton of effects, though; the useful question is how much cleanup your particular image needs afterward.

Slazzer and BackgroundCut

Slazzer and BackgroundCut are other photo background removal options. Both also offer API access, which is more relevant if you’re building background removal into another service than if you’re making one book cover.

For your own cover, compare the actual cutouts. A longer feature list won’t fix a missing piece of your character’s coat.

can ai image generators create transparent backgrounds?

Don’t assume that an image showing a plain background is ready to place over another picture. What you need is actual transparency, so the new background shows through around the subject.

For cover design, you can separate the jobs: get the character image you want, then remove its background. You don’t have to get the generator to solve the entire cover at once.

The same design problem remains afterward. A beautiful character and a beautiful background can look ridiculous together if the lighting doesn’t match, the scale is wrong, or the character looks pasted on; removing the background gets rid of the original scene, but it doesn’t make all your other choices for you (unfortunately).

Keep the composition simple. These three book cover layouts give you somewhere sensible to put the character, instead of adding more stuff until there’s nowhere left for the title.

unscreen photo

Unscreen is for removing backgrounds from video and GIFs. If you’re trying to cut a character out of a still photograph for a book cover, use a photo background remover instead.

It belongs in a different part of the process, if you’re working with moving images for promotion.

Putting the cutout on your cover

Try the character against your intended background before spending ages cleaning up every edge. Sometimes the problem isn’t the cutout at all. The pose or lighting just doesn’t work with the scene you’ve chosen.

Change the picture before you start rebuilding the entire cover around a bad fit.

I built the online cover editor to help authors make their own covers.

Once you’ve added the character, leave room for the text. The cover’s job is to attract the right readers, and a complicated scene with perfectly cut-out hair can still fail at that completely.

Before you finish, check the cutout against both a light and a dark background. Look for leftover background around the hair, missing edges and awkward gaps between the arms and body. Fix the parts people will actually see on the finished cover.