Curly Hair Cutout

Curly hair is the hardest edge to cut out

A conference organizer asks for a speaker photo that sits on a solid colored block in the slide template. The only good picture is a friend's phone snapshot at a cafe window, with plants, an espresso machine and a chalkboard menu behind her. The afternoon light also lights up every loose curl, so a quick automatic cutout either chops the curls into a hard shape or leaves a brown and green fringe around them.

Who uses this

• Speakers and panelists who need one photo for a slide template or event page
• Authors and coaches building a consistent set of profile pictures on one brand color
• Anyone with natural curls, coils or fine flyaway hair who has been disappointed by one-click background removers

How the edit is handled

A human editor, with AI tools assisting where they help, separates the hair curl by curl along the edge. The cafe is replaced with a flat coral background in this example, and the color showing through the gaps between curls is the new background, not the old cafe. The backlit rim, the green sweater and the gold earrings stay as shot, and the face is compared with the original at full size.

What the light caught between the strands was never a clean color, so the semi-transparent tips of the hair are an estimate that is made to look natural on the new background. If you will place the cutout on a different color later, tell us the color so the edge can be checked against it.

One honest note on this example: the cutout here was made at a smaller size than the original photo and then enlarged, so the finest curls at the edge look a little softer than in the original. On your order the cutout is made at your photo's full resolution, which keeps more of those fine strands.

What to upload

Send the original photo and the background color or the slide template if you have it. A larger file with sharp hair gives a cleaner edge than a screenshot or a photo sent through a chat app.

Private: recreated on our own images, not customer photos

The before/after shown here is recreated on images created or licensed for this site — never a real customer's photo. Your upload is seen only by the editor working on it, and the edit comes with free revisions within 14 days of delivery if anything needs adjusting.