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Affinity Photo logoaffinity photo · HeyBraza shows you

how to remove background in affinity photo

HeyBraza points at the selection brush, the refine button, and the add-mask icon so the cutout is a few clicks, not an hour of tracing.

removing a background in affinity used to mean slow tracing - now it's a brush, a refine pass, and a mask. the trick is masking the selection instead of deleting it, so you can fix the edges after. here's the clean, non-destructive way in the current app.

or do it yourself

  1. 1make sure you're in the photo studio (the pixel-editing mode), not the develop studio.
  2. 2pick the selection brush tool and paint over your subject until the whole thing is selected.
  3. 3click 'refine' on the context toolbar and brush over hair or fuzzy edges to tidy the selection.
  4. 4with the selection active, click the 'mask layer' button at the bottom of the layers panel - the background hides instead of being deleted.
  5. 5to fix any spots, click the mask thumbnail and paint with a black brush to hide or white to bring back.

let HeyBraza do this with you

HeyBraza is a tiny on-screen guide that points at the right buttons and talks you through it, on windows and mac.

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common questions

is there a one-click background remover in affinity?

the newest affinity adds an ai 'remove background' under the canva ai studio, but it's a paid canva feature - the selection-brush-plus-mask method above is built in and free.

why use a mask instead of deleting the background?

a mask is non-destructive - you can paint the edges back with a brush, while deleting throws the pixels away for good.

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