Feature · Portraits and hair

LassoCut portraits and hair: a separate path for people

People are the hardest subject to cut out: hair, skin against a similar wall, a hand in front of a patterned shirt. LassoCut sends photos of people down their own path, with a separate model for headshots, and keeps the soft edge of hair instead of a hard outline.

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What it does

The subject type is detected. With the default type=auto, a classifier picks the subject type and routes the photo to the best model for that type. Send type=person to skip that step when every photo is of people.
Headshots are told apart. When a face fills a large part of the frame, the photo goes to a model chosen for portraits; other photos of people, full-body shots and groups included, stay with the model for people. Both are reported as X-Type: person.
The edge stays soft. The mask is not just on or off: hair and other soft edges get partly transparent pixels, so the cut-out blends onto a new background. At full size, results go through the high-resolution pass (see HD cut-outs).

A real example

A portrait of a person with curly hair on a plain yellow background — Portrait · curly hair on a yellow backdrop, cut out at full size

The same portrait cut out by LassoCut, curls included, yellow background removed — Portrait · curly hair on a yellow backdrop, cut out at full size

Photo by Filipp Romanovski on Unsplash (Unsplash License); cut out by LassoCut through the API with the default settings. Drag the slider to compare.

How to use it

On the site: drop a portrait on the home page for a preview, or run a whole session through the batch tool.
Photoshop and GIMP: the Photoshop plugin (pending Adobe's review) and the GIMP 3 plug-in add the cut-out as a new layer and only hide your original, so you can refine the hair with a mask.
Command line: lassocut --type person --size full --output-directory out/ session/ (CLI guide).
API: send type=person, and check X-Type in the response:

curl --fail-with-body -H "X-Api-Key: $LASSOCUT_API_KEY" \
     -F "image_file=@portrait.jpg" \
     -F "type=person" \
     -F "size=preview" \
     -o portrait.png \
     https://api.lassocut.com/v1.0/removebg

Run against the production API on 29 September 2026 with the portrait above: HTTP 200, image/png, 433 × 577, X-Type: person, X-Credits-Charged: 0.25. Replace size=preview with size=full for the final file.

Honest limits

Hair against a background of the same colour (blond hair on a beige wall, dark curls on black) can lose strands or keep a bit of the wall. Very fine flyaways may need a touch-up.
Colour spill: the edge pixels keep their original colours; they are not recoloured. Hair shot against a strong colour, like the yellow above, can keep a faint tint of it; on a new background of a similar tone it does not show.
Groups: every person found in the photo is kept. To keep one of them, send roi (a rectangle, x1 y1 x2 y2): everything outside it is removed, so a neighbour who overlaps the rectangle is cut at its edge. See crop and framing.
Large prints: on very large files, very fine hairs can look slightly softer than the rest of the photo.
A result that came out wrong can be sent to POST /improve so the models can learn from it. It is free, open to accounts that have bought credits, up to 10 images a day and 5 MB each.

Privacy: images are processed in memory and a result is kept for up to 10 minutes so that a retry doesn't pay twice, then deleted. Only images you send to /improve are kept. Details in the privacy policy.

Try it on your own photo

Drop an image on the home page to see the cut-out, then create an account for 50 free previews a month (up to 10 a day).

Try it on your image Create a free account