Picture Perfect: How to Add a Background to Any Photo (In Seconds)

An awesome product photo is worth a lot more than a thousand words. So, you need to ensure every visual associated with your brand says exactly what you need it to.

Let’s face it, images do a lot of the heavy lifting in any online shopping experience. When your customers can’t feel the material or get up close and personal with your product before they buy, it’s up to your photos and product descriptions to fill in the gaps.

The pictures you showcase on your store pages, Instagram feed, and ads need to provide context, create desire, and show your customers what they’re getting. 

How can you create professional-looking images that showcase your products? A big part of creating studio-quality visuals is adding the perfect background.

In this article, we’ll cover why you might want or need to add a background to a photo, why this has historically been kind of difficult (especially for the average online seller), and how to add a background to a photo quickly and easily with Pixelcut.

But first, let’s talk about why backgrounds are so important—especially in ecommerce product photos.

Setting the Scene: How Adding a Background Transforms Your Product Photos

Why should you care about adding or removing a background from ecommerce photos? It might seem like a small change—but the impact can be huge.

Setting the Scene: How Adding a Background Transforms Your Product Photos

Adding the right background to your photos allows you to: 

  • Draw Focus to Your Product. Replacing the background of a photo allows you to showcase your product in the best possible way. This could mean setting the scene with a new background image (for example, adding a sandy beach as the backdrop for your sunglasses) or choosing a single color to make your product pop (for instance, adding a simple white background to make your blue clutch stand out).
  • Remove Distractions. Never let random background objects, clashing colors, or any visual clutter distract from your products again. When you thoughtfully select a new background for your product or social media image, you’re also removing any distractions that might pull attention away from your subject.
  • Elevate Your Brand Image. The style of your photos impacts how shoppers view your product, your store, and your brand. Whether you’re listing handmade goods on Etsy or curating jewelry for your brand’s Instagram feed, adding a professional background ensures your photos are making the right statement about your products and your brand.

Changing Photo Backgrounds Hasn’t Always Been Easy

If backgrounds are such an important element of product photos, ads, and social media posts, then why doesn’t everyone edit their images to add the perfect background? 

For starters, many ecommerce business owners don’t know how. Unless you’re a store owner who also happens to be a photo editor or designer, it can be a technical challenge to add a new background to your photos.

Even if you want to learn how to edit your photos like a pro, it’s hard to find the time needed to learn how to use editing tools well. It doesn’t help that traditional design software (like Adobe Photoshop) tends to be overly complex—especially if you only need it to do one or two specific things (like adding or removing a background!).

The good news?

As technology evolves, so do your options for creating professional-looking product photos. With the right tools, it’s easy for anyone to add or remove a background from a photo in just a few taps.

All you need is a smartphone and a background-changing app like Pixelcut.

How to Add a Background to a Photo in Minutes 

How to Add a Background to a Photo in Minutes 

Ready to see how easily you can remove an existing background and add a new one in just a few taps? Let’s get to it!

Once you’ve downloaded Pixelcut (available for both iOS and Android), follow this simple step-by-step tutorial. 

Step 1: Add a Photo

Create a new project in Pixelcut and add a photo. You can take a new photo from within the app by clicking the camera button or upload an image from your photos.

Step 1: Add a Photo

Pro tip: Have a few different product photos that you want to add the same background to? Pixelcut Pro allows pro users to “batch” images together, so you can remove and add backgrounds from multiple pictures at once. 

This is a great solution for quickly creating a series of photos for a product line or individual product. For example, if you wanted to showcase an item from different angles or highlight several pieces in a collection, you could apply the same background to each photo to tie them all together.

Step 2: Slide to Remove Background

Here’s where the real magic happens: To remove a background from any photo, simply drag your finger along the slider bar.

Step 2: Slide to Remove Background

When you remove the original image background, Pixelcut creates a cut-out of your product (or whatever your subject is!) to be paired with a new backdrop of your choice.

If there are any imperfections in the cut-out, you can use the eraser tool to clean it up. From there, it’s easy to superimpose your product over virtually any type of background. 

Pixelcut creates a cut-out of your product

Pro tip: You can customize this step by choosing the level of transparency–or removing the background completely. Just move your finger along the slider to get the desired effect.

You can customize this step by choosing the level of transparency–or removing the background completely

Step 3: Choose a New Background

Once you’ve removed the original background from your image, you have the freedom to try out different backgrounds to see what works best.

You have three possible options here: 

  • Choose a new background from your camera roll
  • Search our massive visual library for the perfect background image (including 2M+ stock photos from Unsplash)
  • Select a background color from the palette for a simple, monochrome backdrop.

If you already have the perfect photo on hand, you can easily upload it from your camera roll.

Or, if you have a specific type of backdrop or design in mind, you can search our giant library of user-generated content (UGC). Use keywords that match your desired aesthetic, whether that’s “retro”, “boho”, “rural”—whatever speaks to your brand and makes sense for your product.

Step 3: Choose a New Background

Sometimes, you might not know quite what you’re looking for until you see it.

In need of inspiration? Select one of our favorites from the Pixelcut collections, which include themes like wood, bokeh, studio, and botanical.

Pro tip: Our UGC library is growing. With new templates added every day, there are always new options to choose from. Best of all, these designs are available to everyone in the community for free!

Step 4 (Optional): Refine + Customize

Now that you’ve got the perfect backdrop for your product, you can save, publish, or add more details to really make your image pop.

Step 4 (Optional): Refine + Customize

Pixelcut makes it easy to fine-tune your final result with different photo effects, including shadows, reflections, and filters. 

You can also add an outline, frame, and custom text; choose from a huge selection of stickers; and adjust properties like opacity and brightness to fully customize your final result.

Create Your Own Beautiful Product Photo in 15 Seconds

As an ecommerce merchant, you know the importance of carefully crafted images that say the right things about your products. 

Whether you want to clean up a cluttered image with a simple background, add a colorful backdrop, or create cut-outs of your products, Pixelcut is the simplest, fastest way to edit your photos.

With so many photo editing features at your fingertips, it’s never been easier to create professional images for your ecommerce store, ads, or social media feed.

To see just how quickly you can swap out an image background with Pixelcut, watch how it’s done in 15 seconds:

Looking for an easy way to add a background to your photos in just a few steps? Join more than 10 million small businesses and entrepreneurs and start creating custom images with Pixelcut. 

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