CutItOut

CutItOut cuts the background out of an image and gives you back a full-resolution transparent PNG. It does the work in the browser tab, with no upload step and no account, which is the whole reason it exists — the commercial equivalents all want the image on their server and most of them watermark the result or cap the output resolution.

How it works

The segmentation model is U2-Net, a salient-object detector, run through the @imgly/background-removal library. That library ships the model as ONNX and executes it with the ONNX runtime compiled to webassembly, so inference happens in the page. Because there is no inference server, hosting cost is whatever a static site costs and the privacy claim is structural rather than a policy promise: the bytes never leave the device.

The rest is an editing surface on top of the mask the model produces. Automatic segmentation gets edges wrong on hair, glass and low-contrast boundaries, so there is a magic brush that adds or removes regions by colour similarity, a restore mode that shows the removed pixels as a ghost overlay while you paint them back, and zoom/pan for working at pixel scale. Export is full resolution.

The build is a Vite app, and the production output is a dist/ directory that drops onto any static host.

git clone https://github.com/Suvink/cut-it-out.git
cd cut-it-out
npm install
npm run dev     # http://localhost:5173
npm run build   # dist/, deployable to Vercel, Netlify, Pages

Limitations

The model and the runtime have to be downloaded before the first image can be processed, so the first use on a cold cache is slow and the tool is not usable offline until then. Inference is CPU-bound WebAssembly; large images on a modest laptop take noticeable seconds. U2-Net is a general salient-object model, not a portrait matting model, so it is decent on a single clear subject and weak on multiple subjects, fine hair and semi-transparent edges — hence the manual brush.

Almost all of the value here is in @imgly/background-removal and the U2-Net weights; CutItOut is the editing UI around them. That is not a criticism of the tool so much as a note on where the dependency risk sits. The repo has had no commits since the day it was published in December 2025, which for a small self-contained static app is closer to "finished" than "abandoned", but it does mean upstream model or runtime improvements won't arrive on their own.

Repo: github.com/Suvink/cut-it-out — ~435 stars, Apache-2.0, TypeScript.