How to create a holiday card with open source tools

Easily remove photo backgrounds this holiday season using rembg.

This year, there are several open source tools available that can help you create a personalized holiday card. If you have a great photo of your family or grandchildren but want to change the background—perhaps to fit a festive winter scene—you can use a Python module called rembg to remove and replace the background. Here’s how you can get started with it.

Getting started

First, set up a Python virtual environment to keep things organized. I created a directory named rembg with the following command:

$ mkdir rembg 

Next, set up the virtual environment:

python3 -m venv /home/don/rembg

Then activate the environment with this command:

source /home/don/rembg/bin/activate

Now, you’re ready to install the necessary dependencies. First, install rembg:

pip3 install rembg

To use rembg from the command line, install the command-line interface as well:

pip3 install "rembg[cli]"

You’ll also need onnxruntime, which acts as a machine learning accelerator:

pip3 install onnxruntime

Removing the background

Now, let’s get to the fun part—removing the background from your image. I’ve selected a recent photo of my wife and I, taken in the fall. While I love the image, I’d like to give it a more festive backdrop.

Make sure your image is in the rembg folder, and then run this command to remove the background:

rembg i grandparents.jpg grandparents_no_bg.jpg

In this command, the i flag tells rembg to process the file. I also renamed the output file (grandparents_no_bg.jpg) to keep the original image in case I want to use it again. After running the command, you should see that the background has been removed from your image.

Adding a new background

Once the background is removed, you can get creative. For my card, I used InkScape to design a festive background. I added some holiday lettering and a Poinsettia image I downloaded from OpenClipart.org. The completed card turned out beautifully!

Both rembg and onnxruntime are open source with an MIT License.

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This article is adapted from “Transforming family photos into festive holiday cards with AI” by Don Watkins, and is republished with permission from the author.