Matte

Matte removes the background from an image. You send it a photo and it sends back a PNG with a transparent background. It runs as a small Laravel application in your own Laravel Cloud account, on your own database, queue and storage bucket, so there is no per-image fee to anybody.

Matte is mostly an HTTP API: three routes that anything able to make an HTTP request can call. If the app sending images is a Laravel app, the artisan-build/matte-client package wraps those calls for you, and Scalpels can wire that connection up so the credential never passes through your hands.

What Matte does and does not do

Matte does one thing: plain background removal.

• It accepts one image per request and returns a PNG with an alpha channel. There is no batch endpoint and no other output format.
• It has two engines. ml runs a machine-learning model and is the default; grabcut is a classical algorithm that needs no model and is much faster.
• Requests are asynchronous by default: you submit an image, get a job id, poll the job, then download the result. A synchronous mode returns the PNG in the same request.
• Originals and results are written to your bucket. Nothing deletes them automatically.

It does not resize, crop, recolour, add shadows or backgrounds, serve images from a CDN, or edit images in any other way. You take the PNG and do the rest yourself.

How it fits with Scalpels

Scalpels installs Matte into your team's GitHub and Laravel Cloud accounts. It forks the repository, provisions the database, managed queue and storage bucket Matte declares, bakes the background-removal binary into the build, runs the migrations and deploys. See Install a product for how installs work in general.

Matte is a provider. Once it is running, you can attach your other Laravel applications to it from Scalpels, and Scalpels writes the server URL and a per-app credential into each one. See Attach to an existing app.

In these docs

• Getting started covers what the install provisions and how to check the running instance.
• Using the API documents the three routes, their options and responses, and how to get a credential for a caller that is not a Laravel app.
• Connecting your apps covers the Laravel client, what attaching an app does and how to verify the connection.
• Configuration lists the settings on the Matte server and in a connected app.
• Use Matte from your agent describes the read-only MCP tools for inspecting jobs.
• Troubleshooting explains the failures you are most likely to meet and what to do about each.

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