The Transparent PNG
Making one is the easy half. Keeping it transparent all the way to wherever it is going is the other half.
Checked August 6, 2026
The short answer
A transparent PNG is an ordinary PNG whose background pixels are recorded as not being there, so whatever sits behind it shows through. Get one by cutting the background out of an image and saving as PNG. Check it by putting it on a saturated colour rather than on the grey checkerboard. Keep it by never letting the file pass through JPEG, which has no transparency at all and fills it in.
Where transparency survives, and where it does not
| Destination | Transparency | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A PNG or WebP file | Survives | Both carry a full alpha channel. |
| A JPEG file | Gone | Filled with a colour on save, permanently, at any quality setting. |
| A web page | Survives | The page behind it shows through, which is the entire point. |
| A PDF page | Filled with white | A PDF page has nowhere to put it, so something has to go behind it. |
| Documents and slides | Usually survives | Placing it works. Some export and print paths flatten it onto white anyway. |
| A print shop | Ask first | Print is not transparent. Something decides what goes behind it, and it should be you. |
One rule sits under all of these: transparency needs a format that can hold it and a surface that can show it. Where either is missing a colour gets chosen, and if you did not choose it, something else did.
How to make one
Two routes. Cut the subject out of a photograph, which is what a background remover does, or start in something that draws with transparency in the first place and export as PNG.
For a photograph, the quality of the result is decided entirely at the edges. A cutout that keeps hair and soft edges has partial transparency along them, which is what an alpha channel is for. A cutout that treats every pixel as either subject or background gives you a hard silhouette, and it looks pasted on the moment it sits over a colour.
How to check it is actually transparent
Not on the checkerboard. The grey and white squares your viewer draws are light, and light grey hides exactly the defect that is most common: a pale halo of the original background still clinging to the edge.
Put it on a saturated colour instead, red or black, and look for four things. A halo, which is background that came along for the ride. Erosion, where the mask sits inside the true edge and the subject looks shaved. Filled holes, in gaps that should be see through, between an arm and a body or through the handle of a mug. And hard stair stepped edges, which mean the transparency only ever had two states instead of a range.
The four places it gets filled in
Saving as JPEG, which accounts for most cases. JPEG has no alpha channel, so every transparent pixel becomes a colour, usually white and sometimes black, and reopening the file recovers nothing.
Uploading somewhere that re-encodes. Plenty of services convert whatever you hand them, and if their output is JPEG then your transparency was spent on the way in.
Placing it into a PDF. A PDF page needs something behind the image, so a transparent PNG goes onto white.
Screenshotting it. A screenshot captures what was on the screen, which includes whatever was behind the image, checkerboard included.
File size, honestly
PNG is lossless, so a transparent PNG of a photograph is large, often several times what a JPEG of the same picture would be. That is the price of both the transparency and the exactness, and no setting removes it.
WebP is the way out where the destination can read it. It holds the same alpha channel in a much smaller file and every current browser displays it. For a file being handed to another person or another program, PNG is still the safer choice.
Getting a cutout
The background remover here returns a PNG with a full alpha channel, hair and soft edges included, free and with no watermark. It is one of the three tools on this site that do send your file to our servers: the image is processed and dropped, never stored, and never used to train anything. The other twelve send nothing anywhere, and that difference is worth stating rather than blurring.
More guides
GuidesFAQ
- How do I make a PNG with a transparent background?
- Cut the background out of the image and save as PNG. On this site that is the background remover, which hands back a PNG with a full alpha channel.
- Why does my transparent PNG have a white or black background?
- Because it passed through something with no transparency, almost always JPEG, and a colour was written where the transparency used to be. It can also be your viewer drawing transparent areas as black rather than as a checkerboard.
- Is JPG or PNG better for transparency?
- PNG, because JPEG has none at all. No quality setting or export option changes that.
- How do I check whether a PNG is really transparent?
- Put it on a saturated colour rather than on the checkerboard. Light grey hides pale halos, which is the defect you are most likely to have and least likely to notice.
- Why is my transparent PNG so large?
- PNG is lossless, so nothing is discarded. A photograph as PNG is often several times the size of the same picture as JPEG. WebP holds the same transparency in a much smaller file when the destination can read it.
- Can a JPEG have a transparent background?
- No. The format has no alpha channel. A JPEG that appears to have one has a white background that happens to match whatever is behind it.
Cut a background out
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