Popping a face out of an image
Pop out & move lifts the person out of a thumbnail as a transparent cutout, reconstructs the background behind where they were standing, and hands you the cutout as a layer you can drag, resize and rotate anywhere on the frame.
It is two operations in one edit: an extraction and an inpaint. The result is a thumbnail whose subject is no longer welded to the background — which is what lets you fix a composition that generated with the person in the wrong place, or reuse the same cutout across several frames.
Pro and up, and marked BETA
Pop-out lives in the editor's Avatar tab alongside face swap, which unlocks on Pro. It carries a BETA badge because the cutout quality depends heavily on how cleanly the subject separates from the background — see when it works well below.
How to use it
- Open the thumbnail in the editor and select the Avatar tab.
- Click Pop avatar out of image. The edit runs — it is doing more work than a normal preset, so give it a few extra seconds.
- You get back a background with the person removed and reconstructed, plus the person as a separate image layer sitting on top.
- Drag the cutout to reposition it. Use the layer controls to resize and rotate.
- Everything else — text layers, baked text, the background — stays where it was.
What it is actually for
- Fixing composition without regenerating. The generated scene is great, but the subject is dead-centre and covering the space your headline needs. Pop them out and slide them right.
- Making room for text. Move the person off the third of the frame where the headline should sit.
- Scale for the sidebar. A subject that is too small to read at 168 pixels can be popped out and enlarged rather than re-generated as a close-up.
- Reuse across a series. One clean cutout of yourself, dropped into several different backgrounds, gives a series a strong consistent look.
- Layering order. Put the person in front of a text layer, or behind it, depending on which reads better.
When it works well — and when it does not
| Clean results | Struggles with |
|---|---|
| Subject clearly separated from the background | Subject the same tone as what is behind them |
| Defined edges — shoulders, arms, hair mass | Fine flyaway hair against a busy background |
| One person in the frame | Several overlapping people |
| Simple or blurred background to reconstruct | Detailed patterned backgrounds directly behind the subject |
| Subject fully inside the frame | Subject cropped by the frame edge |
If a cutout comes back ragged, undo and try the simpler route: use the avatar actions — Move to Left, Make Bigger, Face Camera — which reposition the subject by regenerating the frame rather than cutting them out of it. The result is less flexible but far more reliable on busy images.
Pop-out vs. avatar actions
| Pop out & move | Avatar actions | |
|---|---|---|
| Control | Exact — drag to any pixel | Preset — left, centre, right, bigger, smaller |
| Reliability | Depends on the image | Consistent |
| Reusable elsewhere | Yes — it becomes a layer | No |
| Best when | You know exactly where they should be | You just need them roughly over there |
After popping out
The cutout is a normal image layer. It autosaves with the rest of your draft, so closing the tab does not lose it — see autosave and drafts. When you download, the layers are flattened into the exported image at full resolution.