Removing a background in Elements

The one click route, and the mode you have to be in

The one click route needs you in the right mode first, which is the single most common reason an Elements reader cannot find the command that a tutorial promised.

1. Open the photo and click Expert in the mode bar at the top, since Quick and Guided hide the Layers panel.
2. Open Window > Layers and click your photo layer so it is selected on its own.
3. Double click the layer if it is named Background and locked, and accept the rename, because locked layers refuse most commands.
4. Press Remove Background in the Contextual Task Bar under the canvas.
5. Turn the bar back on from the Window menu, if it is not showing.
6. Press Ctrl+Shift+S and save as PSD to keep the result editable, or export to PNG to keep the transparency in a shareable file.

What goes wrong here is the save. Elements will happily write your cutout to JPEG, and JPEG carries no alpha channel, so the transparent area comes back as flat white. Every transparent export from Elements has to be PNG, and the layered working copy has to be PSD.

Elements 2020, 2021, 2024 and the versions without the button

Elements 2020 and 2021 predate the Contextual Task Bar, so on those releases the one click route is not hidden, it is absent, and hunting the menus for it wastes an afternoon. Version names in this program follow the year of release, so Elements 2020, 2021, 2024 and 2025 are 4 separate purchases rather than updates to one another, and the toolset genuinely differs between them. What every release from Elements 9 onward does share is layer masks, and that is the part the technique depends on.

• Use the Quick Selection Tool at A and drag across the subject, letting Elements grow the selection to the edges it finds.
• Use the Magic Wand in the same tool slot for a flat single colour background, setting Tolerance to about 32 and ticking Contiguous.
• Use the Selection Brush at A for anything the automatic tools will not hold, painting the selection on by hand at a brush size of 20 px to 40 px.
• Use the Refine Selection Brush to push a finished selection outward or inward without starting again.
• Press Ctrl+Shift+I to invert, whenever selecting the background is easier than selecting the subject.

Finish any of those by clicking Add Layer Mask at the top of the Layers panel rather than pressing Delete. A mask you can repaint is worth more than a deletion you cannot, and this is the one habit that separates a repeatable Elements workflow from a destructive one.

Refine Edge, which is where Elements keeps its edge controls

Refine Edge is what Elements offers in place of the Select and Mask workspace that full Photoshop uses, and it holds most of the same controls under older names. With a selection active, choose Select > Refine Edge.

1. Set View to On Black for a light subject or On White for a dark one, so you can see the edge rather than guess at it.
2. Raise Radius to 1 px to 3 px for a hard edge such as a bottle, and to 8 px or more for hair.
3. Tick Smart Radius when a single subject has both kinds of edge.
4. Paint the soft areas with the Refine Radius Tool, in short single strokes rather than a scrubbing motion.
5. Pull Shift Edge to about -10% to remove a pale halo left by a bright background.
6. Tick Decontaminate Colors when the old background has tinted the edge, then set Output To to Layer Mask.

What goes wrong at step 2 is treating Radius as a quality slider. A large radius on a hard edged product shot invents softness that was never in the photograph, and the result reads as a bad cutout for exactly that reason. Match the radius to the edge in front of you, not to how much effort you feel the job deserves.

Where Elements is genuinely weaker, and where it is not

Elements is weaker in 3 places that matter for background work, and knowing them stops you searching for menus that were never there.

The missing Channels panel is the real limitation, because the channel method is the fallback that rescues the hardest cutouts in full Photoshop, and Elements has no equivalent. What Elements has instead is Guided mode, which walks a beginner through a whole operation with the panel highlighted at each step, and for somebody removing a background twice a year that is a better trade than a panel they would never open. Patterns, textures and the decorative fills that Elements ships are not part of this operation and should be left until the cutout is finished.

The free routes, if you do not own Elements

Free routes to the same result exist, and they are worth naming since a large share of Elements searches are really price searches. The Photoshop mobile app launched on iPhone in February 2025, with Android following later that year, and the base app is free, including selections, layers, masks, compositing, Tap Select and the Spot Healing Brush. The full feature set needs a subscription, either an existing desktop plan or the Photoshop Mobile and Web plan at $7.99 a month or $69.99 a year. Photoshop on a phone covers that app in detail.

On a desktop, 4 free programs do this job properly: GIMP, which released 3.0.8 on 24 January 2026, Krita at 5.3.2.1 from 1 June 2026, Photopea, which runs in a browser and opens PSD files with their layer masks intact, and Paint.NET on Windows. Corel also sells PaintShop Pro from its own site with a free trial, which is the nearest paid equivalent to Elements in shape. This site names no crack, serial or full version download for Elements or anything else, on any page, and none is needed: the 4 programs above cut out a subject to the same standard.

Removing a background in Photoshop covers the full desktop version of this operation, including the cases where the automatic selection loses, and Photoshop, operation by operation lists what else this site explains.

Where to go next

PHOTOSHOPPhotoshop, operation by operationPHOTOSHOPRemoving a background in PhotoshopHow to remove a background in PhotoshopPHOTOSHOPPhotoshop on a phoneWhat actually works