Free photo tools: backgrounds, restoration and clean-up

These are the tools for photo work on single pictures: cutting a subject out of its background, bringing an old print back, sharpening something that was shot out of focus, taking a watermark or a date stamp off a photo, and stripping the location out of a holiday picture before it goes online. The heavy jobs run on PicReviver and BGNinja, the passport and visa formats on PassportNinja, the watermark clean-ups on WatermarkNinja, and the metadata remover runs right here on shinobitools.com.

All 61 photo tool pages, 2 how-to pages and 2 API pages

Start from the result you want, not from a tool name. If you want the person without the room behind them, that is background removal. If a picture looks soft, note that unblur, sharpen and upscale are one and the same pass on PicReviver: it sharpens and enlarges to 2x or 4x the width and height together, so the choice between those pages does not change the result. If a photo is both soft and tiny, no pass brings back detail that was never recorded. For a scratched print open Repair Damaged Photo and paint over the damage; for a soft one use the sharpen pass; for lost color use Colorize Photos.

Know the limits before you upload. Hair against a busy background is the hardest case for any cut-out, and upscaling adds plausible detail rather than real detail, so a license plate that was four pixels wide stays unreadable. The AI photo tools give 10 free jobs a day, 3D models from a photo 5 and from a text description 3, and room design 5. Resizing, cropping, flipping, rotating and compressing run in your browser with no limit, and removing an object, a person, text or a shadow has no daily counter. Nothing adds a watermark. Most uploads are deleted right after processing and results are wiped about 45 minutes later; the 3D tools keep the photo and the model for 45 minutes.

Backgrounds and cut-outs

Remove bg is shorthand for one job: keep the subject and turn everything behind it into empty space, so you can save a transparent PNG and place the person or product on another picture later. A white background is the other common request, for shop listings and application forms. Cut the subject out first and fill the empty area with white afterwards, because a flat fill laid over a messy edge looks worse than a clean cut-out.

A logo is usually an easy cut-out because its edge is sharp and flat, and Remove Background from Logo is the page for it. A small blurry logo is the hard case, so start from the largest version you have: it gives the tool a clean edge to follow, and a transparent background is only useful if the edges survive. A profile picture background should be one calm color: cut yourself out and place the cut-out on it, which looks tidier than a busy room.

Watermarks, text and unwanted objects

A watermark sits on top of the picture, so the tool has to guess what was underneath. Remove Watermark from Photo paints over the mark and rebuilds what was behind it, so make sure you have the right to edit the picture first. A thin logo in a corner comes out cleaner than a pattern that crosses the whole image. An AI watermark remover typically paints the area with new pixels instead of blurring it, which helps on detailed pictures, but the repaired part is a reconstruction and never the original.

Text works the same way. Remove Text from Image on BGNinja and Remove Text from Photo on WatermarkNinja paint over a caption, a subtitle or a stray word and rebuild the picture behind it, but long lines over a detailed area leave visible repairs. A logo on a plain area is the easy case: Remove Logo from Image erases a badge or branding overlay, and on flat color or sky the background simply closes up behind it. A corner stamp is the same kind of job, and Remove Instagram Watermark is aimed at the stamp on a saved photo or Reel frame.

The Remove Person from Photo tool is for the stranger who walked through your holiday shot; it works best when what sits behind them is simple, like sky, sand or a wall. A shadow from your own hand across a document is a different problem. Remove Shadow from Photo paints over one shadow on a floor, wall or table and rebuilds what was behind it, which would replace the text of a page, so for a shadow on a photographed document try Remove Shadow from Document, ScanReviver's page for photographed documents. Either way, shoot in even daylight first, because no tool fully rebuilds text that sat in deep shadow.

Restoring, sharpening and enlarging

Order matters when you restore old photos. Scan the print flat first, repair scratches second, restore faces third, colorize if you want color, and enlarge last; the restore pass does not correct fading. A damaged photo with a crack across a face needs more patience than one with a bit of dust, and colorize photos after the repair, so the colorizer has a cleaner picture to guess colors from. If your prints are still in a shoebox, scan old photos soon: a flatbed scan is the best source, and a flat, evenly lit phone photo works too.

Enlarging works best on a file that already has enough pixels. A high resolution photo can be enlarged more safely than a thumbnail, because an upscaler has to invent the extra pixels. AI Upscale Image, Unblur Image and Sharpen Photo on PicReviver run the same sharpen-and-enlarge pass. A quality enhancer that raises clarity and reduces noise in one pass saves time, but no enhancer can restore detail the camera never recorded.

Everyday edits

Photo size matters twice: the size in pixels sets how far you can enlarge, and the size in megabytes decides whether a website accepts the upload. Use Resize Image when a site wants smaller dimensions: it is a resizer that keeps the proportions, so faces do not stretch, and it runs in your browser. Do it before you email a picture, because a phone photo of several megabytes rarely needs to be that big.

Crop Image takes clutter off the edges, and Rotate Image fixes a picture that arrived sideways. Flip Image corrects text that came out mirrored from a selfie camera, and Compress Image to 100KB helps when a form says the upload is too large. Resize Image and Compress Image to 100KB save JPG files, so do those last; crop, rotate and flip save PNG and cost no quality. Many upload forms state both a pixel size and a maximum file size, so check those numbers first.

Passport and visa photos

A passport photo has strict rules: a plain light background, a neutral expression, no glare on glasses, and an exact passport photo size that depends on the country. A US passport photo is 2 by 2 inches. A UK passport photo and a Schengen visa photo are both 35 by 45 millimeters, but the head must be 29 to 34 mm for the UK and 32 to 36 mm for Schengen, so make each one with its own template. Whether a free passport photo made at home is accepted depends on the country, and some insist on a printed photo from a studio, so read the passport photo rules for the country you apply to before you print anything.

An ID photo for a work badge or a driver's license can follow different rules from a passport photo, and a visa photo for another country often has its own size, so read the instructions page first. Babies are a case of their own, and PassportNinja has a Baby Passport Photo Guide for them. Compared with sitting in a booth, passport photos made at home save the trip, but only if you print them at the right size.

Avatars

An AI avatar generator takes one photo of you and restyles it as a cartoon, an action figure or a game character. The result is an illustration based on you, not a photograph of you, so an AI avatar suits a profile on a forum or a game but not a form that asks for a real photograph.

Other groups: Video tools · Audio tools · Transcribe & subtitles · PDF & documents · File converters · Text tools.