During January of 2019, I decided to see what all the different online clipping path companies had to offer. At the time Google brought up 33 different companies. The majority offered a free trial so I picked two images that I had planned on working with.
One of these images was of my nephew whom I wanted to make a trading card for, being that he was no longer in hockey, and both of his older brothers had received their own personal hockey cards. For the image on the back of the card, I hired one of the companies to remove the background.
The cowgirl image is one of my favourites from a rodeo I photographed. It was also one of the hardest to do a background removal on. I never did find time to do a composite of the finished image. Actually, I never did get the background removed to my satisfaction on this one.
Most of these companies offered one free sample which is why you mostly only see one image that was tested in the following table. Some didn't offer any free samples.
I am guessing most of these online companies are clipping path farms, with multiple people working for pennies in a third world country. It doesn't seem to matter on what company you pick, sometimes you will get excellent results, sometimes sub-par results, and sometimes both from the same company. It just depends on the person who is handed your image to work on that day. If you are in a rush you could also have issues with a normally fast company during a time they become swamped with images. It seems like it's a hit-and-miss game with this subject.
This new table was compiled from notes from an old table that was made a little over a year ago. You may ask what good any of this is for you. To be honest, and from what I experienced, not much! What it is good for is so you can copy and use this table to able to find these online clipping path companies more easily, so you can run your own tests. Your images will be different than mine, and you will have different people handling them. I do not think your results will be the same. That said, I would really like to hear about your results in the comment section. You can even send me your own table that I can post here.
NEPHEW IMAGE |
COWGIRL IMAGE |
COMMENTS |
|
|
They kept sending me unedited versions! |
Buy Credits. |
|
|
So so. Nice dirt but bad hair. |
|
|
|
|
The site was down, but is up now. |
|
|
So so. Good Hair. |
|
|
|
X |
|
|
|
|
The site was down, but is up now. |
|
Bad and Good. |
|
|
|
So so, to Good. |
|
|
|
So so, to Bad. |
|
|
|
|
So so. |
|
|
Best. |
So so. Bad Hair. |
They only sent one back? |
|
|
X |
|
|
|
X |
|
|
2nd Best. |
|
One month later they asked for images again. |
|
Nice. |
|
|
|
|
So so, but they did an interesting background. |
|
|
|
|
Had a bad URL. Fixed. Now leads to Clipping Path India. |
|
|
Horse Hair not as good. 2nd best woman’s hair. Best after 3rd try on dirt. |
|
|
So so. They send this image back to me twice! |
Medium. Best Hair. They can’t figure out the dirt after 3 tries! |
|
|
|
So so. Hair may be more defined. |
|
|
|
|
No free sample. |
|
|
So so. |
One Image. |
|
|
|
Offline. |
|
|
X |
No free sample. |
|
|
So so. |
|
|
|
|
The site was down, but is up now. |
|
X |
|
|
|
|
X |
|
|
|
So so. |
|
|
|
X |
Wouldn’t give me an e-mail address. Set up account. Slow. Couldn’t seem to get requested edits done. |
|
|
So so. Very nice dirt first try, but bad hair. |
|
|
|
X |
They don’t do this type of work. |
|
|
Medium. Woman’s hair not as good as some others. They can’t figure out dirt after 3 tries! |
|
How to travel light, with one carry-on bag.
List of Online Clipping Path Companies and how I rated their work.
l 1 l |