Looking for an easy way to remove a background from one of your digital photos? Commercial photo editing programs like Photoshop have the tools necessary to erase complicated backgrounds from digital photos, but unless you are a professional, you probably don’t have this installed on your computer.

Luckily, there’s a way to remove backgrounds without needing Photoshop and actually without needing any software! There are many online photo editing services that you can use, one of which is FotoFlexer, a free online photo editor with many advanced features.

It is by the far the most advanced online editor in terms of the GUI interface, which is super fast, and in terms of the number of tools available, including morphing, recoloring, layering, effects, animations, and lots more.

To remove a background from an image, first upload a picture to FotoFlexer. You do not have to create an account if you already have photos on your computer. You can also grab pictures directly from Picasa, flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and Photobuck, but you’ll have to create a free account.

Now click on the Geek tab at the right and you’ll see a couple of buttons like Smart Cutout and Smart Scissors. The Smart Scissors tool is what we want to use here. It’s very similar to the magnetic lasso tool in Photoshop.

Now you will want to begin drawing a boundary around the part of the image you want to cut out from the background. Click at the starting point and then continue clicking in small increments along the outer edges of the object. You’ll notice that on each click, the Smart Scissors will automatically snap the curved lines around the the object like shown below:

Continue clicking around the object until you get to the end. Then you’ll need to join the last dot with your first dot in order to create a closed selection. Only then will you see that the option “Create Cutout” become available. When you hover over the first dot you had created, you’ll see it turns green, click on it and the background will darken.

Your final image would look like something below. You’ll have to play around with the scissors tools, but basically if you want a better cut, you’ll have to create more points at smaller distances.

You can use this free service to remove a person from a large group or to merge two photographs together, i.e. take one part of one picture and join it with a different part of a second picture. Enjoy!

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