BgImageA PictureEditor.com tool
Generated on your machine.

Make a plain colour background

One colour, one pair of dimensions, one file. The stack is put away on this route because there is nothing to stack.

white ground. 1920 × 1080 pixels.

Ground

Everything above sits on this. A layer with any transparency in it takes its shade from here.

Output size

File format
Set the size in millimetres or inches
Unit

A physical size is a claim about paper, so it needs the resolution beside it. At 300 DPI this canvas prints 162.6 by 91.4 millimetres.

2.1 megapixels

The ground colour is the whole design here. Everything else — layers, seeds, the dither pass — belongs to the routes that need them and would only be furniture on this one.

Eight colours worth having

All forty

Plain white and near-black are the two most asked for, and both are here at the values that behave rather than at the extremes. Pure white on a screen is harsh and pure black hides its own edges, so these sit one step inside each.

The colour is easy; the size is the question

A request for a plain background is almost never really about the colour. The colour takes a second. What takes the time is that the thing receiving it wants 1200 by 630, or 2480 by 3508, or whatever the panel behind the desk happens to be, and a file of the wrong dimensions gets stretched, cropped or rejected.

So the dimensions sit beside the download here, the six common figures are a keypress away, and any other pair can be typed. If the destination is physical — a sheet, a card, a print — the panel under the size fields takes millimetres or inches with a resolution and works out the pixels, because a physical measurement without a resolution beside it is not a measurement.

Flat colour is the one case where format is obvious

Compression works by finding repetition, and a flat colour is nothing but repetition. PNG stores it as a run and the file is trivially small; JPG breaks the same image into blocks and encodes each one, which is more work for a worse result; WebP sits between the two and is smaller than PNG on a large flat area but needs a browser that writes it.

A 1920 × 1080 flat colour, measured by this page's own estimate
FormatTypical sizeWorth choosing when
PNGa few kilobytesalmost always
WebPa few kilobytesyou control where it is opened
JPGtens of kilobytessomething downstream insists on it

The figure beside the download control is not from this table. It is measured by encoding a small copy of the design you are actually looking at and scaling by the pixel count, so it moves when you move a control.

What a plain file does not fix

  1. A white file is not a white background for a photograph of a person. Putting one behind somebody means separating them from what is already behind them first, and nothing here can do that or has any way to read the photograph in the first place. This route makes the white rectangle, at whatever size that other job needs it.
  2. Every file from this site is opaque. There is no alpha channel to switch on, because the ground colour is painted before anything else is drawn, so a plain colour here cannot stand in for a transparent one.

Questions about plain colours

Why would anyone download a plain colour rather than draw a rectangle?
Because a great many things take an image file and will not take a colour. A slide template, a video editor's background track, a printer's proof sheet, a placeholder in a layout, a test card for a display, a fill behind a logo in software that has no fill tool. In every one of those the answer is a file of a stated size in a stated colour, and making one by hand in an image editor takes longer than it should.
What does a plain white file weigh?
Almost nothing as a PNG. A 1920 by 1080 flat colour is a few hundred bytes, because the compressor finds two million identical pixels and stores the fact rather than the pixels. The same image as a JPG is larger, often by a factor of twenty, since that format is built to lose detail rather than to find repetition. For a flat colour, PNG is not a preference, it is the right answer.
Is the colour I get exactly the hex I typed?
Yes, for any value that fits in sRGB, which is every six-digit hex code. The value is converted into the perceptual space the rest of the tool works in and back again on the way out, and that round trip is exact to the byte for an eight-bit channel. What the screen shows depends on its own profile and calibration, which nothing in a file can control.
Can I get a transparent background instead of a colour?
Not from this page. Every export here is opaque: the ground colour is painted first and the layers sit on it, so there is no alpha to carry. A transparent file is what you want when something is going on top of it, which is a compositing job rather than a background one, and it is not what this site makes.

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