Ideogram Background Remover

Every ComfyUI user eventually hits the same wall: you've got a subject on a busy background and you need it cut out clean, and the local options are a fiddly rembg install or a mask-and-inpaint marathon. This node is the shortcut - Ideogram's background remover, running on Runware's cloud, one image in and a cut-out back. It's about as simple as a node gets, and simple is the selling point.

Ideogram is the image lab best known for text-in-image rendering, and its API includes this background-removal tool. The node hands that tool a plain ComfyUI image and returns the same image with the background gone. What makes it genuinely useful rather than a toy is what the output preserves: the outputFormat tooltip spells out the one thing that matters for cut-outs - PNG and WEBP keep the alpha channel, JPG does not. If you're compositing the result onto another image, exporting a gradient, or handing the cut-out to another layer, set the format to PNG and you get a real transparent background instead of a flattened frame.

The input list is almost embarrassingly short, which is the point of a utility node. image is required - wire any IMAGE output into it. ttl and ttl_value control how long the result stays retrievable as a URL (irrelevant unless you're pulling the raw URL). outputFormat defaults to PNG - leave it - and outputQuality exists for the rare case you want a lossy cut-out. The output is image, ready for Save Image or to feed straight into a compositing node. That's the whole node.

Install

It's one node inside the Runware pack, so the setup is the pack setup: search Runware in ComfyUI Manager and install, or cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes && git clone https://github.com/Runware/ComfyUI-Runware && pip install -r ComfyUI-Runware/requirements.txt, then restart. You'll need a Runware API key from the dashboard - Settings → Runware API key, RUNWARE_API_KEY, or runware auth login - and no models download; the cut-out happens on Runware's hardware.

When to use it - and when not to

This is a "clean subject, decent source image" tool: product shots, portraits on busy streets, the kind of image where the local rembg model leaves a fuzzy hairline and Ideogram's cloud model does better. It's also pay-per-call, so it isn't the tool for batch-cutting 500 frames - for that, bite the bullet and set up a local background remover. And be honest about what you're sending: your image leaves the machine and goes through Runware's processing, so anything sensitive doesn't belong here. But for the occasional hero cut-out where hair detail matters and you'd rather not debug a segmentation model at 11pm, it's the one to reach for.