How to Cut Out Anything from a Photo (Click-to-Select AI)

The fastest way to cut out an object from a photo is to click it once and let a segmentation model figure out the edges. ImageCraft, the free photo editor built into ClipCraft, has a tool for exactly that: AI Select. You click the thing you want, marching ants appear around it, and from there the cutout is two more clicks. This guide covers the three AI engines it ships with (one is free and runs entirely in your browser), how to fix a selection the AI got almost right, and the cases where an old-fashioned magic wand beats all of them.

Where the tool lives

Open ImageCraft and load a photo. In the tool strip on the left, the Object button (keyboard shortcut W) holds a flyout with four selection tools: Quick Selection, Magic Wand, Object Selection, and AI Select. Pick AI Select and the options bar across the top changes to show an engine toggle with three choices: Fast, AI Basic, and GPU+.

The editor itself is free and runs client-side; if you want the wider tour, there's a full post on ImageCraft covering layers, masks, and the rest. You'll need a free accountto use it, but no card and no tokens for anything in this post except the two paid engines, which I'll flag clearly.

The three engines, honestly

Fastis a slimmed-down Segment Anything model (SlimSAM) that runs on your own machine. Nothing uploads. The first use downloads about 14 MB of model weights, and the first click on each image takes a few seconds while it analyzes the picture; after that, every click resolves in under a second. Cost: zero, forever. The trade-off is accuracy. On a clean photo it's genuinely good (it grabbed the whole mug in my test shot, handle included), but on a busy photo with soft edges or clutter it can under-select or bleed into the background.

AI Basicruns the bigger SAM2 model on our server. It costs 5 tokens, and here's the part that matters: the 5 tokens buy the image analysis, once. Every click after that on the same image is free, so you can select the shirt, then the sky, then the car, one after another, on a single charge. Masks come back sharper than Fast, and it will segment any region you point at, including regions that aren't the main subject. If the analysis fails or the server is unreachable, the tokens come back and the click falls back to the on-device model, so a bad connection never blocks you.

GPU+ is the same BiRefNet engine that powers our Background Remover tool, running on an A100 GPU. It costs 10 tokens for one analysis, which computes a full subject matte for the photo; every click after that is free and picks the connected region under your cursor. That last part is the killer feature: in a photo with two dogs, clicking one dog selects that dog, not both. It produces the cleanest edges of the three (hair and fur especially), but it only mattes things that read as subjects. Click the sky or a background wall and it just shows a hint, no charge, because there's nothing there for it to grab. For arbitrary regions, AI Basic is the right tier.

On the free plan's 100 monthly tokens, that works out to 20 AI Basic images or 10 GPU+ images a month. Token packs start at $0.99 for 100 if you run out, and they never expire.

Cut out an object from a photo, step by step

1. Sign up free and open ImageCraft, then drop your photo onto the canvas.
2. Press W (or click Object in the tool strip) and pick AI Select from the flyout.
3. Leave the engine on Fast to start. It costs nothing to find out if it's enough.
4. Click the object you want. A violet status chip narrates while the model loads and analyzes.
5. When the marching ants appear, check the edges. Fix them if needed (next section).
6. Turn the selection into a cutout with a layer mask (two sections down).

Refining a selection the AI almost nailed

Every selection tool in ImageCraft shares the same two modifiers: hold Shift and click to add to the selection, hold Alt and click to subtract from it. So if AI Select grabbed the dog but missed an ear, Shift-click the ear. If it took a bit of the floor along with the shoe, Alt-click the floor. You can even mix tools mid-selection: start with an AI click, then switch to Quick Selection and Shift-drag over the missed patch with a brush. The selection is one shared mask underneath, so everything composes.

Deselect is Esc or Ctrl+D when you want to start over. And one honest limitation while we're here: selections in ImageCraft don't constrain the paint tools yet. You can mask and delete through a selection, but a brush stroke will still paint outside the ants. That's on the roadmap.

From selection to cutout

With the ants active, click the Add layer mask button (the ▣ icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, or the button in the Properties panel). The mask is built from your selection: the object stays visible, everything else goes transparent. You get the checkerboard background immediately.

The reason to prefer a mask over deleting pixels: it's non-destructive. The mask's Properties panel gives you a Feather slider to soften a crunchy edge, a Density slider to bring the background partially back, Invert to flip the cutout, and a Refine row (Smooth / Expand / Contract) to nudge the edge in or out. Paint on the mask with any brush to fix spots by hand: white reveals, black hides. When it's perfect, File → Download PNG exports with the transparency intact, ready to drop into a thumbnail or composite.

If you'd rather remove the object than keep it, the same selection works in reverse: press Delete with the ants active and the selected pixels clear to transparent on that layer.

When the simple tools beat the AI

AI Select is the headline, but three classical tools sit in the same flyout. They cost nothing to run, and sometimes they win outright.

• Magic Wand: click once to select everything of a similar color. On a flat or near-flat background it's instant and pixel-perfect, no model required. The Tolerance slider (default 28) sets how far the color match stretches, and the Contiguous checkbox decides if it jumps across the whole image or stays connected to your click.
• Quick Selection: a brush that grows the selection over similar adjacent pixels as you drag. Good for organic shapes you want to steer yourself; [ and ] resize the brush.
• Object Selection: drag a box around a subject and a classical (no ML) extraction picks out what's inside. Works best on clean backgrounds.
• Marquee (M key): rectangles and ellipses. If the thing you're cutting out is a screenshot or anything else rectangular, dragging a marquee will always be faster than asking a neural network.

My rule of thumb after using all of them: flat background, use the wand. Rectangle, use the marquee. Everything else, start with a free Fast click and only spend tokens when the edges matter. Whole-subject jobs like product shots are often quicker in the dedicated Background Remover, which uses the same GPU+ engine but wraps it in a one-purpose tool with background swaps built in.

Costs are worth restating plainly: the editor, the classic selection tools, the Fast engine, masks, and PNG export are all free. Tokens only come into it for AI Basic and GPU+, and the paid plans mostly exist for storage and heavier compute anyway.