Recraft Remove Background

Need a clean subject on a transparent background in one click? This is that click. Feed it any image and it returns two things at once: the cutout with the background removed, and a mask of exactly what was kept. No prompt, no settings, no model loading - one input, two outputs.

The nice touch is the mask. Background removal tools usually give you either a transparent PNG or a mask, and you improvise the other. Here the node derives the mask straight from the alpha channel of the result and hands you both, which makes it genuinely useful for chaining: mask into an inpaint or composite workflow, image into a transparent-PNG save or a layer stack.

How it works

It's another hosted Recraft call - your image goes to /proxy/recraft/images/removeBackground, Recraft's segmentation model does the cutout on their side, and you get back an RGBA image. The alpha channel becomes your MASK output, reshaped to the standard B,H,W mask format that every ComfyUI mask node expects. The whole thing is billed per image from your Comfy account credits.

Inputs and outputs

The schema is minimal:

• image - the IMAGE to cut out
• IMAGE out - the cutout with transparency in the alpha channel
• MASK out - where the subject is, derived from that alpha

Both outputs come from the same pass, so they always agree with each other. That's worth more than it sounds like when you're building a composite.

Getting it

Ships with ComfyUI core. You need a Comfy account and credit balance - the hosted partner nodes don't run on your hardware. No model files to place anywhere.

Where people get burned

• The free local option is genuinely good now. This is the honest tradeoff to weigh. Background removal is the most commoditized operation in the ecosystem - BiRefNet shipped in core ComfyUI in May 2026 and handles hair and fine edges very well on your own GPU, for free, forever. If you're just cutting out product shots locally, a core BiRefNet-based flow beats paying per call.
• Hair and transparency are still the frontier. The hosted model is solid, but nobody has fully won semi-transparent materials, flyaway hair, or thin structures. Check edges on anything with those before you ship it.
• The mask is the alpha, so it's as good or bad as the cutout. There's no second "refine the mask" pass in this node - what you see in the alpha is what you get. If the edge is ragged, you'd fix it downstream with a blur/dilate or a different segmenter.

When is it the right call? When you're already working a paid Recraft pipeline, when you're batch-processing and don't want to babysit a local model, or when the hosted cutout quality beats what your GPU setup produces. Otherwise the local free path is hard to argue with - and the KB's advice applies here too: pick the tool by which failure you can tolerate, not by which is newest.