The text-behind-subject effect, automated
The text-behind-subject look, a huge headline that seems to pass behind a person, is everywhere: YouTube thumbnails, album art, posters, and social graphics. Producing it normally means masking the subject by hand in an editor. Here the AI does the masking: one cutout call separates your subject, and the tool layers your text between the background and the subject so letters disappear naturally behind shoulders, heads, and props.
Only that first cutout uses the free daily AI allowance. From then on the editing is pure browser canvas: type new text, switch fonts, recolor, rotate, stack several text layers, and drag them around the image, with every change rendering instantly and costing nothing.
Getting the classic look
The effect works best when the text is huge and the overlap is obvious. Start with a short word in Impact or Arial Black at a large size, position it so the subject covers its lower half, and keep high contrast between text color and background. Multiple layers add depth: a giant faded word behind the subject plus a small sharp line elsewhere reads like a designed poster. Photos with a clearly separated subject, a person against sky, a product on a table, a pet on grass, cut out most cleanly.
What to expect
The export is a full-resolution PNG rendered from your original pixels; the text is drawn as vector-sharp type at export size, so nothing comes back downscaled or pixelated. If you want the cutout itself on a transparent background, the free AI background remover gives you exactly that, and the free AI background blur uses the same one-call pipeline for portrait-style bokeh. The tool accepts JPG, PNG, and WebP up to 4096px per side. Uploads are processed transiently for the cutout and never stored in a gallery.