Hitech’s BPM division services many customers, 90% of which are in the eCommerce space. However, 80% of the work is carried out for one single company by a separate project manager.

In order to maximize clients’ online revenue, Hitech carries out image retouching for customers. This work often involves removing backgrounds and placing them on transparent or mono-color replacements. After that, images are uploaded to websites and mobile apps.

With such a large throughput of images and with each background taking between four and five minutes to remove by hand, the team needed between two to six people to process 1,000 images in a 24-hour period.

The time taken depended on the original image and whether editors could achieve results with Photoshop’s Select Subject or Lasso Tool. However, the team was obviously keen to use remove.bg to achieve the same tasks more quickly and simply.

Back in 2021, a Hitech Senior VP introduced remove.bg to the BPM team. He saw it as a way to reduce manual efforts and wanted the BPM people to test it out. The team purchased subscriptions in the spring of that year.

Early experiments were with 1,000-1,500 images, with the volume gradually increasing until it reached today’s 30-35,000 images processed per month. The team sometimes uses the remove.bg plugin for Photoshop on an ad hoc basis and the desktop app for bulk processing depending on the product required.

The team found remove.bg extremely user-friendly, with simple output to PNG or PSD.

Following its introduction, the team saves between 50-60% of the time it took removing backgrounds from photos. Where six people were working on the task, now only two are needed.

Hitech’s BPM division has found that between 94-95% of images processed with remove.bg are of high enough quality to be uploaded for the client straight away.

The extra resource provides quality control and carries out improvements on the 6% that require extra work before publishing. The extra human resource can be put towards different kinds of image retouching: whatever helps to serve the customers more quickly.

Project managers say a big plus of working with remove.bg has been the ability to use multiple API keys. That lets managers understand exactly how credits are being used and which team is processing more images.

The first benefit of this is to keep an eye on productivity in the teams. When people understand they have a grip on exactly how many backgrounds are being removed, they are more likely to keep productivity high. Secondly, it allows managers to send more images to teams to process pictures faster.

Project managers say that their relationship with remove.bg has come a long way from the initial 100 images to multiple APIs. Hitech has benefited from remove.bg’s quality improvement program by differentiating objects from same-colored backgrounds or where light from a product creates glare. The team submitted some sample images to remove.bg's customer success team to help sort it out.

For example, the team is testing a new implementation of the software on property windows with a black border that remove.bg had a habit of assuming was part of the background. To do this, Hitech supplied the software team with the “before” image and the one processed manually with the windows still intact so the algorithm could learn what they wanted.

While this algorithm was training, Hitech assigned a person to weed out the small number of images that seem likely to struggle.

Hitech and remove.bg are working together to explore increased functionality in the future.