Green Screen Removal for Clean Background Swaps

Q: Does it work with blue screens or other backdrop colors?

Yes. Click Blue; the other settings work the same way as with green. Other clearly colored backdrops work with a matching saturated key color, but black, white or gray ones cannot be removed cleanly because the tool ignores brightness. For still photos, Remove Background cuts out the subject without any colored backdrop.

What is chroma key?

Chroma key removes a selected background color—usually green—from a video so it can become transparent or be replaced. Upload the clip, sample the key color, then adjust tolerance, edge softness and spill reduction while checking the preview. Export the keyed subject over transparency, a solid color or your own background image.

Cost: Free to use. File size and usage limits apply.

How to remove a green screen from a video

Upload the video
Click Choose files or drop your video onto the preview, together with a background picture if you want one. The first video becomes the source, the first picture the background. Files already in Uploads, including results from other tools, can be picked there instead.
Check the key color
The key color starts as pure green (#00FF00); click Blue for a blue screen. The badge on the preview shows the key color currently selected.
Adjust the sliders only if needed
The defaults remove a saturated, evenly lit green screen. For a pale or patchy screen, follow the rule of thumb below.
Choose the new background
Under Background, pick Transparent, Color or Image. For Image, check the picture in the list (it starts with your most recent picture in Uploads) and choose Fill, Fit or Stretch. The run button stays disabled until a picture is selected.
Run the job and download
Click Remove Green Screen, play the result, then click Download. Continue editing keeps your settings, so you can adjust them and run the job again.

Chroma key settings explained

Key color: The color to remove, set with the color picker or the Green, Blue and Red buttons. The tool compares hue and saturation only and ignores brightness, so a black, white or gray backdrop cannot be removed without removing every neutral tone in the shot. Keep the key color fully saturated: a real screen is usually a paler green, and picking that exact shade also removes white, gray, black and skin tones at the default settings. Red rarely works with people in the shot, because skin tones turn partly transparent.
Tolerance (1–50, default 20): How far a color may be from the key color and still be removed completely. At 20, a strongly saturated green screen disappears, while pale, overexposed or shadowed areas stay partly visible. Raise it in steps of 2–3. Green or turquoise items on your subject, such as a teal shirt, are partly or fully removed along with the screen.
Edge smoothing (0–5 in steps of 0.5, default 1.5): Adds a soft transition just beyond the Tolerance limit, where colors become semi-transparent instead of being cut hard. It helps with hair and motion blur. 0 gives hard, sometimes jagged edges; high values make the whole subject see-through (at 5 with the default Tolerance, white and skin keep only about 35–40 % opacity).
Spill suppression (0–1 in steps of 0.1, default 1): Removes the green cast a screen reflects onto hair, shoulders and light clothing. 0 switches it off, any value above 0 switches it on, and higher is not simply stronger. At 1, green is only reduced where it is stronger than red, which clears a green tint from white and gray areas and leaves normal skin tones alone. Lower values also pull green out of warm colors and can tint skin and hair pink. It acts on the whole frame, so set 0 if teal or turquoise objects must keep their exact color. With a blue key it removes a blue cast in the same way. Spill suppression works with key colors that are mainly green or blue; with Red and other key colors it stays off.
Background: Transparent exports a WebM video with an alpha channel. Color fills the removed area with the color you pick (white by default) and exports an MP4. Image places a picture from your uploads behind the subject for the whole video and exports an MP4; animated GIFs loop. JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, HEIC and other common picture formats can be used.
Image fit: Fill scales the picture until it covers the frame and crops the overflow evenly on both sides. Fit shows the whole picture and fills the empty bars with the color last chosen under Color (white by default). Stretch distorts the picture to the exact frame size.

A rule of thumb for a clean key

Every color in your video has a distance from the key color on the same scale as Tolerance. Colors closer than Tolerance are removed completely. Colors farther away than Tolerance plus ten times Edge smoothing stay fully visible. Everything in between becomes semi-transparent. With the defaults of 20 and 1.5, that fade zone runs from 20 to 35.

White, gray, black and typical skin tones sit at a distance of roughly 36 or more from pure green or pure blue. As a rule of thumb, keep Tolerance + 10 × Edge smoothing at or below 35. The defaults are already at that limit, so whenever you raise Tolerance, lower Edge smoothing to match.

Example: a pale, unevenly lit screen still shows a green haze at the defaults. Tolerance 30 with Edge smoothing 0.5 (30 + 5 = 35) clears the pale areas and almost all of the shadowed ones while white, gray and skin stay fully opaque. 33 with 0 clears the rest but gives hard edges. 30 with the default 1.5 (30 + 15 = 45) would leave white and gray at about half opacity and skin noticeably see-through.

Because every attempt is a full render, trim a 5–10 second excerpt with Cut Video, find your settings on it, then process the full clip. Even lighting matters more than any slider: shadows make the screen less saturated to the tool and push up the Tolerance you need.

What the finished file contains

Transparent produces a WebM file with VP9 video, an alpha channel and Opus audio at 128 kbps. Browsers such as Chrome and Edge display the transparency; players that ignore the alpha channel show an opaque background instead. Encoding VP9 with transparency takes several times longer than MP4, so long clips are more likely to hit the 15-minute job limit.

Color and Image produce an MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio at 192 kbps. In all modes the duration stays the same, the frame rate is kept up to 60 fps (faster footage becomes 60 fps) and only the first audio track is included. The video is always re-encoded, so the file size can change noticeably. The download keeps your file name with _no_bg added.

Formats and limits

Source video: MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV, AVI, M4V, MPEG/MPG, OGV
Background image: JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, TIFF, AVIF, HEIC, ICO or TGA from your uploads (only with Image)
Output format: WebM (VP9 with alpha, Opus) for Transparent; MP4 (H.264, AAC) for Color and Image
Maximum file size: 200 MB per file
Files per job: 1 video, plus 1 background image with Image
Processing: On our servers with FFmpeg; no AI or external service receives your files. A job can run for up to 15 minutes.
Watermark: None
Storage: Uploads and results are deleted automatically after 48 hours for guests and after 30 days for free accounts. Paid plans can keep files longer.

Frequently asked questions

Why is there still a green haze after removing the green screen?

Your screen is paler or less evenly lit than the key color. Raise Tolerance in steps of 2–3 and lower Edge smoothing to stay within the rule of thumb above, for example 30 and 0.5. Don't use the exact shade of your screen as key color; that removes parts of the subject as well.

Why did parts of my subject become transparent?

Most likely Tolerance + 10 × Edge smoothing is above about 35, or the key color is a pale shade. Colors close to the key are removed too, such as turquoise clothing, or skin with the Red preset. Lower the values or go back to Green or Blue.

Why is the result larger than my original video?

The video is always re-encoded. A transparent WebM also stores an alpha channel, and many phones record in HEVC, which is more compact than the H.264 used for the MP4 output. You can shrink an MP4 result afterwards with Compress Video.

Does it work with blue screens or other backdrop colors?

Yes. Click Blue; the other settings work the same way as with green. Other clearly colored backdrops work with a matching saturated key color, but black, white or gray ones cannot be removed cleanly because the tool ignores brightness. For still photos, Remove Background cuts out the subject without any colored backdrop.

Does it work with upright phone videos?

Yes. Many phones store an upright clip as a landscape frame, for example 1920 × 1080 px, plus a flag that tells players to turn it. The tool applies that flag, so the result is an upright 1080 × 1920 px video with the same proportions you see on your phone.