How to Remove the Background of an Image in Microsoft Paint

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2024-05-30

In this tutorial, we'll learn how to remove the background of an image and save it as a transparent PNG using Microsoft Paint, which is installed by default on Windows.

Step 1: open Paint and open the image you want to remove the background of.

Step 2: click the "Remove background" tool button on the left side of the ribbon. This will make a rainbow-colored border appear on the image as the background removal algorithm runs, then the background will disappear.

The location of the remove background tool in Microsoft Paint. — The location of the remove background tool in Microsoft Paint (red rectangle).

Step 3. click File -> Save as -> PNG picture on the menubar to save the image.

How to Change the Background Color

To change the background color from the default white to another color, follow the following steps:

First, click on "Layers" button on the ribbon. This will make a sidebar appear.

Click on the button at the bottom of the sidebar. This will make a color selection dialog appear.

Select the color you want on the dialog, then click the OK button. The background color will have changed.

How to Make the Background Transparent

To set the background color to transparent, such that it becomes transparent when saved as PNG, follow the following steps:

First, click on "Layers" button on the ribbon. This will make a sidebar appear.

Then, right click on the button at the bottom of the sidebar to make its context menu appear.

Lastly, click on "Hide background" (keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+H). You can also do this by clicking on the tiny eye icon on the button. Doing this, the background will become a checkerboard pattern that indicates the background is transparent.

Video

Observations

Transparency: when the background is "hidden," saving the image as PNG will save it as a transparent PNG, indicating that "hidden" doesn't mean it's only hidden in Paint, it's actually going to make the image transparent. On the other hand, the saved PNG has pre-multiplied alpha, which means if you made the background color orange, then hid it, you can't save as PNG, open it in Paint again, unhide the background, and get the orange background back. The background will be saved as fully-transparent black in the PNG file, but when loaded and unhidden in Paint it will be white.

Privacy: the rainbow-colored effect made me think this could be some privacy-invasive feature at first, like it was sending the image to Microsoft's servers so they could remove the background with AI and then send it back. However, the feature works even offline, so it's all being processed in your computer.

No undo: for some reason the remove background action doesn't register in the undo history: if you paste an image, then remove its background, then undo, Paint will undo the pasting of the image as well.