Show HN: AI Background Remover | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: AI Background Remover

photoroom.com

102 pointsvvoyer36 comments

On show HN four days ago, open source alternative, that does video too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929397

Nice project @darermx! Just tried it on a few picture and it's impressive. To be fair this is not working as great for theses pictures as PhotoRoom background remover but still a good start!

Nice! Not to be all jaded, but there’s one of these services launching per month (week?) these days. Some are free (but then usually poor quality), others cost money (usually with some resolution limited freebie or credits-on-signup).

I run https://clippingmagic.com, which launched here on hn eight years ago now - time flies [1].

We were #1 until the recent surge in DL-based solutions. It’s more fun to be the disruptor, but getting disrupted sure brought some renewed focus - competition works ;)

Just updated our DL model - old dogs take a while, but we finally did get a fully automatic solution including hair, which means we’re the only option with both good full auto and an editor (on desktop, didn't try this one's mobile app - I guess they have some editing options there?)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5682831

Hey Jacob! I am discovering all theses tools myself (I joined PhotoRoom 5 weeks ago and created the web tool of this post).

We're indeed mobile first but plan to go on the web more aggressively in the coming weeks. Our mobile app has a lot of editing features, effects, touch retouch/inpaiting and interactive segmentation (subject selection, scribbles) just like Clipping Magic.

I also love competition even if we try not to look to much at it and just roll with our user feedback and requests.

PS: I've used Vector Magic in the past, amazing tool :) Also used https://www.pngtosvg.com/ which works really well besides the very hacky-look webpage.

Canva has this feature, but it's only available to premium users. I use it quite a bit when making YouTube thumbnails that contain my face. It's nice to have a free alternative.

Here's another free option: https://www.remove.bg/

btw, Canva was using remove.bg from the start, and now owns the company behind it, Kaleido.

Wow! I thought Remask AI from Topaz Labs was good, but this did what took a few seconds what took me several minutes of corrections in that other program. It worked quite beautifully for multiple photos that I thought it would choke on.

Now to start faking my travel to Paris and Milan on Tinder.

Congratulations @vvyoer! We are active paid users of https://www.unscreen.com/ for video background removal. Do you have plans to add support for video background removal anytime soon?

Eliot here, I work with Vincent on PhotoRoom. Our current focus is shipping an incredible app on the web and on mobile, but we'll tackle video very soon!

Wolfram language has the `RemoveBackground` which does this in a single function call: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/RemoveBackground....

Bravo! That's great. I've heard about https://www.remove.bg/ but this is next level (or two).

Wow, worked really well on an image of mine where it wouldn't necessarily be obvious what to remove. In fact I think it did better than the manual keying I did on it years ago.

That's awesome feedback, our ML engineers will be very proud :)

Seems to work well based on a quick trial on the web site.

Annoying that I seem to have to download the app to see how much it costs.

Hey there, indeed I put an upsell screen at the end of the download because our mobile apps are currently the most advanced background remover and image editing tools we have.

The price for the mobile app is $9.50 per month and there's a free version.

Why did you choose a monthly subscription model? I’m genuinely curious because I’m a “one off” user. I don’t use it frequently enough to justify a recurring monthly cost.

Have you considered a bulk credits payment model (ex. $19.99 for 1,000 photo processing credits) for users like me?

Credits is the way to go, most common biz model in the industry. I understand their appetite for MRR but there should be a more low entry plan.

We started as a mobile app and the subscription model was the obvious choice here. Most of our pro users are hardcore PhotoRoom users that will need this on multiple occasions.

Now for one off users this is a good question, especially on the web where this could make more sense. I know some tools (remove.bg) that have this system so we'll think about it.

Thanks!

Um … “most of our users are users who will pay for this model” doesn’t really prove what you think it proves.

But more to the point $120 - $240 assuming major versions last a year or two is too much relative to, say, apps in Adobe suite or especially too much relative to the new sleek photo editing apps and suites for MacOS and iOS (like Affinity).

Neat! For the last year or so, I’ve used remove.bg if I want to quickly create a transparent PNG. N=1, photoroom.com does seem to work a bit faster, but the results don’t seem as accurate and I don’t see a quick way (on the web version) to make minor corrections.

Thanks. We've seen it go both ways: sometimes the results are better on PhotoRoom, sometimes they are better on remove.bg. If you try the mobile app you'll see that we do have ways to easily correct the background remover algorithm.

For example you can adjust the subject selection or just scratch the parts you don't want and we'll try to infer the bigger picture from theses scratches.

We will bring this functionality to the web very soon. Thanks for the feedback!

Tested with Parked Domain Girl, worked great!

(https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/parked-domain-girl)

Wow the ads on there completely obscure content without any way to get them to go away. Halves of paragraphs entirely unreadable on mobile Chrome.

Yeah I was reluctant to link to it, it's terrible.

Anyways, here's the result (dear god imgur is terrible now too- you have to watch a video ad before uploading): https://i.imgur.com/ao5zeSa.png

just used it today for removing white background from my favicon

very neat indeed

What kind of tech stacks runs this image removal part?

My guess is something very similar to U2Net https://github.com/xuebinqin/U-2-Net

Matthieu here, ML engineer at PhotoRoom. We use a custom UNet model. We work with PyTorch for research and use Tensor RT and CoreML to deploy models.

It didn’t work in my picture. It has trees in the background from a small hill looking down.

https://vanceai.com/remove-background/

https://www10.lunapic.com/editor/

https://www.remove.bg/ https://socialbook.io/remove-background

Hey there, could you link me your picture via https://imgbb.com/? So I can have a look, thanks!

Please change your logo\casing from 'PhotoRoom' to 'Photoroom'. It'll look more fluid. There is no need for 'Room' to stand out. Let it be low key.

If you have your own reasons for the current styling then you can totally ignore my request :-)

1. Has this ever worked for you before? 2. This is clearly a designed logo, which means yes, lots of reasoning went into it. 3. Please change your user name to include your entire last name, it would be more clear.

Duh! Clearly, that feedback was not for you. You acted like a junior engineer who writes code like a nail in the wall and gets butt hurt when he receives code review feedback :-)

Amazing product, keep it up

pretty cool!

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