How to Remove a Background in Affinity Designer

In this tutorial, I’ll be demonstrating how you can easily remove a background in Affinity Designer. Considering that it is a vector-based application, you would assume that it wouldn’t be the best option for you to remove a background in Affinity Designer. However, Designer comes equipped with a powerful pixel editor that allows you to make basic edits to images.

To erase a background, Affinity Designer offers two main techniques that will be featured in this tutorial. Follow these steps to learn how to remove a white background or even a busy background from any image. Let’s start!

What You Will Learn in This Affinity Designer Tutorial

How to remove a white background in Affinity Designer
How to use the Select Sampled Color option in Affinity Designer
How to use the Selection Brush Tool in Affinity Designer
How to remove a busy background from an image in Affinity Designer

Tutorial Assets

To demonstrate the two techniques, I will be using these two photos from Envato Elements:

1. How to Open the Image in Affinity Designer

Let’s start by opening up the image by going to File > Open and locating the image on your computer. Double-click on it to import it into Affinity. I’ll be using the beautiful daisy flower image in this section of the tutorial to demonstrate the first background removal technique.

Next, we want to remove the lock from the layer by clicking on the lock icon in the top right corner of the Layers panel while the background image is selected. Another option is to right-click on the background layer and deselect Lock from the menu.

2. How to Access Pixel Persona in Affinity Designer

Since this image is a rasterized photo made of pixels rather than a vector design, we want to work with the Pixel Persona for this. Go to the top left corner of the application and click on the Pixel Persona icon, which is made of small colored boxes. Once you’ve accessed it, notice how the tools have changed.

3. How to Erase a White Background in Affinity Designer

Step 1

Having a JPEG image with a white background is a common reason to want to remove the white space and have it with a transparent background instead. It doesn’t really matter if it’s white, black, blue, or any other solid color for this technique that you are about to use.

I recommend zooming in on the image. Then, while it’s still selected, go to Select > Select Sampled Color.

Step 2

Designer will automatically select the main color of your image, so in this case, it will select the white. You can choose another color from your image that you might want by simply clicking on that colored area, and your selection will change.

Next, you can adjust the Tolerance level with the slider if you feel as if it’s not picking up haze or different soft gradients that might be around a color that you are removing. Increasing the value from 15% upwards might give you a closer to the edge selection, but this depends from image to image. Hit Apply.

Step 3

To actually remove the white background, you can hit the Delete key on your keyboard or just go to Edit > Delete. Make sure to follow up this action by going with Select > Deselect.

Step 4

The next natural step is to check the result you got. Any time you remove a background that is white or any kind of solid-colored background, you want to make sure you put a contrasting color behind it to make sure you actually removed all of the background.

To do this, go back to the Designer Persona by clicking on the icon in the upper left corner of the application, and then use the Rectangle Tool (M) to click and draw a shape about the size of your image. Fill it with black or any other contrasting color, and make sure to move it behind the subject.

Zoom in as much as you need and take a look around the edges of the subject. If you did not remove all of the background, you will see a white haze around the image because some of those pixels might be different hues. This happens a lot, so don’t worry. It’s fixable.

Step 5

By repeating the previous steps, you will get a much more precise selection. While in the Pixel Persona, go back to Select > Select Sampled Color and click exactly on the haze to sample that specific hue. Choose a much higher Tolerance level of 30% and hit Apply. Next, press the Delete key on your keyboard to actually remove the remaining background followed by Select > Deselect.

Back in the Designer Persona, check out the result. Your extraction should be perfect now. You have successfully learned how to remove a white background in Affinity Designer.