Remove backgrounds from flat-lay apparel shots for e-commerce (PNG)

What the engine does with these images

Flat lays are shot on seamless paper, which is the ideal input. Fabric edges are soft rather than sharp, and because alpha comes from a smoothstep over colour distance rather than a threshold, that softness is preserved instead of being cut to a hard line.

How e-commerce teams run it

Catalogue teams process in batches at ingest, not one image at a time, so throughput and a machine-readable confidence signal matter more than an editor. The batch endpoint applies quota per item and returns 207 with a per-item outcome, so a partial batch is reported as one.

Delivering as PNG

PNG is the only output here that carries a real alpha channel, so it is the only one that preserves a soft edge rather than approximating it. That matters more than it sounds: the engine produces alpha as a smooth transfer over colour distance and never thresholds it to fully-on or fully-off, so an anti-aliased boundary, a strand of hair or the taper of a shadow arrives as genuine partial transparency. Flatten that to a binary mask and the edge acquires the stair-stepped look that makes a cutout read as a cutout. PNG is also lossless, so the file you receive is the file the engine produced — no recompression is quietly re-drawing the boundary you are about to composite.

• API documentation — authentication, endpoints, errors and runnable examples.
• Compared with other tools — sourced, dated claims.
• How the engine works — routing, the confidence gate, and what it cannot do.