Remove backgrounds from photos using FotoFlexer

This is a guest post by Aseem Kishore, a technology enthusiast and lead blogger for Online-Tech-Tips.
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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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.