Remove image backgrounds on your Mac — offline
Drop an image in, get a clean transparent PNG back. Cutout runs a segmentation model on your Mac's Neural Engine, so there is no upload, no watermark, no per‑image credit, and no sign‑up before you can see whether it handles your hardest photo.
The edge is the whole job
Anything can cut out a person standing against a plain wall. What separates a usable background remover from a frustrating one is what happens at the boundary: flyaway hair, fur, motion blur, a wine glass, a plant with a hundred thin leaves.
Cutout produces a soft-edged mask rather than a hard selection, so those pixels keep their partial transparency instead of being clipped to a jagged outline. That is the difference between a cutout you can drop onto a new background and one you have to spend twenty minutes repairing.
Three things to do with the background
- Transparent — a PNG with a real alpha channel, which is what most people want.
- Solid colour — flatten onto a colour you pick, for product shots that need a consistent backdrop across a catalogue.
- Matte — export the greyscale mask by itself, for compositing in Photoshop, Affinity or a video editor.
Runs on the Neural Engine
The model is a compiled CoreML package that runs on the Apple Neural Engine rather than a general-purpose CPU path, which is why it is quick without spinning your fans up. The first image after launch takes a few seconds longer while CoreML builds its cache; everything after that is fast.
It ships inside the app, so there is nothing to download before your first cutout and no connection required to make one.
What it handles
- Input — PNG, JPG, WebP, HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, BMP and GIF.
- Output — transparent PNG, flattened colour, or the mask on its own.
- Batches — drop in a folder and Pro works through the queue in order.
Lite and Pro
Lite ships inside the free Rude Dog hub. It runs the same model at full quality and caps the longest edge of the output at 1600 px, one image at a time. Quality is never what gets gated — size and throughput are.
Pro removes the size cap, unlocks mask export and batch queueing for £29 paid once. Renewing the update window later costs £15 and is optional — the version you bought keeps working either way.
Comparing the options
There are several ways to remove a background on a Mac, including one already built into macOS. We wrote up the whole field — what each handles, where they fail, and when paying for this one is not worth it.
Requirements
A Mac running macOS. Cutout is signed and notarised by Apple, and installs through the free hub.
The other Rude Dog tools
- Transcribe — audio and video to text, offline
- Upscale — enlarge images up to 4× without losing detail
- Interpolate — double or quadruple a video's frame rate
All four are covered by the Suite licence, and every one ships a free Lite tier inside the same hub download.
Questions
Does it upload my images anywhere?
No. The segmentation model is bundled inside the app and runs on your Mac's Neural Engine. Images are read from disk and written back to disk, with no upload, no account needed to process a file, and no connection required — it works with the network switched off entirely.
Is there a watermark on the free tier?
No. Lite renders at full quality and caps only the longest edge of the output at 1600 px. The cut itself is never degraded, nothing is stamped on the result, and there is no reduced-quality preview to pay for. Size and throughput are what Lite limits, never quality.
How does it handle hair and fur?
This is the case the model is chosen for. It produces a soft-edged mask rather than a hard selection, so fine strands, fur and semi-transparent edges like glass keep their partial opacity instead of being clipped to a jagged outline you then have to spend time repairing by hand.
What can I do with the background?
Three things. Drop it entirely for a transparent PNG with a real alpha channel, which is what most people want. Flatten it onto a solid colour you choose, useful for product shots needing a consistent backdrop across a catalogue. Or export the greyscale mask alone to composite elsewhere.
What files can it open?
PNG, JPG, WebP, HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, BMP and GIF — which covers iPhone photos, screenshots, design exports and images pulled off the web. What comes out is a PNG with transparency, a flattened image on the colour you picked, or the greyscale mask on its own.
Why is the first image slower than the rest?
CoreML compiles a cache for the Apple Neural Engine on the first prediction after launch, which takes roughly six seconds. Every image after that runs at full speed. It is a one-off warm-up per launch rather than the normal processing time, and the app shows it as a warming state.
Is it a subscription?
No. £29 once, and that version is yours permanently — it keeps working after the two-year update window closes. Renewing for £15 only re-opens access to newer builds; it is never required to keep using the version you already bought.