There are several open-source tools available this year for creating holiday cards. If you have a wonderful photo of your family or grandchildren, but it was taken during a different season and you’d like to change the background, there’s a Python module called rembg that can help you with that. To get started, you’ll need to set up a Python virtual environment and install the necessary dependencies. I created a directory named rembg using the following command:
$ mkdir rembg Then I setup a Python virtual environment.
python3 -m venv /home/don/rembg
Then I activate the environment with the following command.
source /home/don/rembg/bin/activate
Then I install rembg:
pip3 install rembg
I want to use rembg from the command line so I make the following additional installation:
pip3 install "rembg[cli]"
Then I install onnxruntime which is a machine learning accelerator.
pip3 install onnxruntime
Now I am ready to remove the background from the image that I have chosen. This is a recent picture of my wife and I taken in the fall of the year. I like the picture but I want it to have a festive background.
I make sure that my image is in the rembg folder and then execute the following command. The i switch means that I am operating at the file level.
rembg i grandparents.jpg grandparents_no_bg.jpg
In the command above I renamed the output file so that I would still have my original just in case I wanted to use it again. You can see below that the background has been removed from the image above.
I can create a nice background for my card with InkScape and add some festive lettering and use a Pointsettia I downloaded from Openclipart.org. The completed card is shown below.
Rembg is open source with an MIT License. Onnxruntime is open source with an MIT License.