Image tools guide

Choose the right tool for your image

Most photo jobs come down to a few questions: do you need a different background, a smaller file, a different shape or format, better colours, a watermark or notes, or a picture that is safe to share? Work out which one you need first, then pick the tool.

Updated 8 October 2026. This guide covers RedactNinja Image. Every tool runs in your browser, so your pictures are not uploaded. Open image tools.

Cut out a person, pet or product

Use Remove background when you need the subject on its own: a transparent PNG for a logo or design, a product on plain white for a shop listing, or a portrait with the background softened. You can select up to 50 photos at once; the subject is found in each one in turn and they can all be saved together as a ZIP.

1. Choose Soft edges for hair, fur and anything slightly out of focus, and Sharp edges for products, logos and hard outlines.
2. Look at the edges at full size. Fine hair, glass and smoke are the hardest parts for any background remover.
3. Paint over anything left behind with Erase, or anything missing with Restore, then tick Crop to the subject if you want the empty space trimmed.

A transparent background needs PNG or WebP. Saving as JPG fills the transparent area with a colour, because JPG cannot store transparency.

Make a photo smaller for email, a form or a website

There are two different kinds of smaller, and it helps to know which one you are being asked for. File size is how many kilobytes or megabytes the file takes up. Pixel size is the width and height of the picture.

Use Compress image when a form or email says the file must be under a limit, such as 500 KB or 2 MB. Tick Make each file smaller than a set size and enter the limit; the tool lowers the quality, and the pixel size only if it has to. Use Resize image when you are asked for a particular width or height, such as 1,080 pixels wide for a social post, or when a phone photo is far larger than the screen it will be seen on.

1. Keep the original. Compressing or shrinking a copy cannot be undone on that copy.
2. For a photo going on a website, resize it first and then compress it. A smaller picture compresses much further.
3. Zoom in on faces, small text and fine detail before you send the result. Smaller is not better if it can no longer be read.

Change the shape or turn a picture

Use Crop image to trim a photo to the part you need, freehand or to a fixed shape such as square for a profile picture, 4:5 for a portrait post, 16:9 for a banner or 1.91:1 for a link preview. Use Rotate image for a photo that appears on its side, or to flip it.

Cropping removes the outer part of the picture from the copy you save. It is not a safe way to hide something in the middle of a picture; use the blur tool's solid box for that.

Change the file format

Use Convert image, or one of the direct pages such as PNG to JPG, JPG to PNG and WebP to JPG.

• JPG suits photos and gives small files, but cannot be transparent and loses a little detail each time it is saved.
• PNG suits screenshots, logos and anything with sharp text or transparency. Photos saved as PNG are much larger.
• WebP gives smaller files for websites and supports transparency. Safari and other iPhone and iPad browsers can open WebP but cannot save it, so the WebP option does not appear there.

iPhone photos are often HEIC, which Windows, many websites and older programs cannot open. Use HEIC to JPG to turn them into ordinary JPG files; the photos are decoded on your device. Every image tool can also open HEIC photos directly. To stop an iPhone saving HEIC, set Settings > Camera > Formats to Most Compatible.

Fix the colours or sharpen a photo

Use Adjust colours for a photo that is too dark, flat, cold or slightly soft, or to make it black and white or sepia. Start with a preset, then fine-tune the brightness, contrast, colour strength, warmth and sharpening while watching the preview. The same changes can be applied to a whole set of photos, which keeps them consistent.

Small changes usually look best. Strong contrast loses detail in bright and dark areas, and heavy sharpening adds bright outlines round edges.

Mark a photo as yours

Use Add watermark to put your name, website or logo on photos before you post or send them, on one photo or a batch. A small watermark in a corner credits your work but is easy to crop off; a semi-transparent watermark repeated across the picture is much harder to remove, which suits proofs sent before payment.

Explain something with a screenshot

Use Annotate screenshot to add arrows, boxes, highlights, numbered steps and short notes, for example to show a colleague which setting to change. Paste a screenshot straight in with Ctrl+V. Cover replaces an email address, phone number or password with a solid block in the saved copy, which is safer than blurring text.

To show several steps or a before and after, use Combine images to put pictures side by side, one above the other or in a grid, with optional labels.

Make icons for a website

Use Favicon and icon maker to turn a logo into favicon.ico, the small PNG icons browsers show in tabs, the Apple touch icon and the Android icons, with the lines of HTML to add to your pages. Start from a square image at least 512 pixels across, and keep the design simple: a 16 pixel icon has no room for small text.

Check a photo before you share it

Photos from phones and cameras can carry the exact place they were taken, the date and time, the camera and sometimes the owner's name. Remove EXIF and location data shows what a photo contains, then saves a copy without it. The picture itself is not recompressed.

Use Blur faces and details to hide people who have not agreed to be in a photo, and anything else you do not want to share, such as a number plate, a house number, a name badge or a screen. For names, numbers and other text, use Solid box: light blur or pixelation of text can sometimes be reversed.

Social networks often remove location details when you post, but email, messaging apps that send the original file and cloud sharing links usually do not. If in doubt, check the copy you are about to send.

Copy text out of a picture

Use Image to text for a screenshot, a photo of a letter or a scanned page. Check names, dates, reference numbers and amounts against the picture before you rely on them, because a single misread character can change a meaning. For a scanned PDF, use OCR PDF instead, which adds searchable text to the PDF itself.

Turn pictures into a PDF

To put photos or scanned pages into one document, use JPG to PDF on RedactNinja PDF. Each picture becomes a page, in the order shown. If the result is too large to send, run Compress PDF on it afterwards. Our PDF tools guide covers the PDF side.

If the result is not right

Keep the original and try again on a copy. Very large photos depend on your device's memory, so an older phone may be slow or run out of room; resizing the photo first usually helps. Each tool takes images up to 50 MB and 40 megapixels, and up to 50 at a time. The background remover downloads its model, about 46 MB, from the image tools site the first time, and your browser keeps a copy for next time.

Report a problem with the tool name, your browser and what happened. Please use a picture without personal details where you can, and do not send photos of other people without their agreement.

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