Cutting out a product image

Vendor photography arrives on a background: a grey studio sweep, a styled room, a shadow the vendor liked. On a board where six products sit together, those backgrounds fight each other. Cutting the product out — silhouetting it — is what makes a board read as one composition instead of six catalogue tiles.

Studiohaus does this in the board editor, in the browser. Nothing is uploaded to a background-removal service.

Opening the cutout editor

Place an image on a board, select it, and open Cutout from the inspector. The editor opens with an automatic first pass already applied — for a product shot on a plain background, that's often the whole job, and you can close it there.

The object's Cutout toggle in the inspector switches between the cut-out version and the original photo, so the change is never destructive. Turn it off and the vendor's background comes back.

Fixing what the first pass missed

Two tools, top of the modal:

Point — click the thing you want kept. Each click refines the selection: click the chair, and the model works out where the chair ends. Complicated silhouettes (a lamp with an open frame, a chair with visible legs) usually need two or three clicks rather than one.

Brush — a manual eraser for what's left. Drag to clear background the model held on to, or to bring back part of the product it removed. The cursor ring shows exactly how much you're painting; the brush size is adjustable, and there's an edge-aware mode that follows a product's outline instead of ploughing straight through it.

Point first, brush second. Getting 90% from a click or two and cleaning the last 10% by hand is far faster than brushing from scratch.

What makes a good cutout

• Straight-on product photography cuts out beautifully. Room scenes rarely do — the model can't tell which sofa you meant when the whole photo is a living room.
• Hard edges beat soft ones. Upholstery with a fringe, a plant, anything with fine detail against a busy background will need brush work.
• Check the hem. The most common flaw is a thin halo of old background along a bottom edge. Zoom in, take the brush down a size, and clear it — it's the difference between "cut out" and "cut out properly".

When not to bother

A cutout isn't automatically better. A rug photographed flat, a fabric swatch, a piece of art — these want their rectangle. Silhouetting everything makes a board float; the compositional interest usually comes from mixing cut-out objects with a couple of square-edged ones.

Performance notes

The first cutout you run in a session downloads the model, so it takes noticeably longer than the ones after it — a minute is not unusual on a slow connection. After that, each cutout is a second or two. If the editor ever feels stuck on the very first use, it's almost always that download, not a hang.

Related

• Design boards: the basics
• The product clipper