Most "remove the background" features ship a segmentation model to the browser or call an API. For one specific job, cleaning up product photos for an interior mood board, we got away with neither. Here is what we did, and where it falls apart.

The constraint: retail product photos are boring in a useful way

When someone drops a sofa or a lamp onto a mood board, the image almost always comes from a retailer's listing. Those photos share a trait: the object sits on a white or near-white studio background that touches every edge of the frame.

That means you do not need to understand what a sofa is.…