Have you ever looked at a photo you took and wished that you could remove something in the background that was annoying or unnecessary? Until now the only way to do this was either to fire up a high quality image editor like Photoshop, or send the image off to a processing service like the most excellent Tucia.com.

Clipping Magic aims to give you a third alternative. This innovative new service provides a free (for now!) image editing feature focused on removing any unwanted part of the background in an image. It’s extremely easy to use. Just upload your image, mark out the parts you want to keep and those you want to remove with a few squiggles of the mouse, and hit the Download button.

The system gives you a live preview of your changes as you make them, and provides a powerful zoom function so you can get up close to the parts you need to tweak to make everything look natural.

The interface is so simple it’s ridiculous, which makes the tool an absolute cinch to use. The only thing we wish the developers could include is some sort of anti-aliasing feature, so you can blend in the edges of the cut out image more effectively. At the moment, the edges are a little too obvious for our liking.

But that quibble aside, this is a top notch service, and something that most people could use without even thinking about it. We’ve seen similar functions in online photo editors before, but not done so elegantly. As we said the service is free while it’s in Alpha testing, so it will be interesting to see if people are willing to pay for it once it officially goes public.

But for now, here’s an opportunity for anyone looking to tweak their old photos, dig ’em out and have a go before the service starts charging. Take that, you photobombing swine.