BLOG · SPONSORED BY ADOBE EXPRESS · I JUST SAVED 30 MINUTES, EP. 1
How to Save 30 Minutes Editing LinkedIn Photos with Adobe Express
A 5-step walkthrough for removing background clutter from a LinkedIn photo in under 30 seconds — without Photoshop, without paying a designer, without losing what matters.
Want to follow along with this exact workflow? Try Adobe Express free
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My origin story
The Moment I Stopped Fighting Photoshop
I remember the exact moment.
It was a Tuesday afternoon in March 2024. I'd just wrapped a podcast taping at a coworking space in Jacksonville — one of those interviews where the conversation actually worked, the host knew their stuff, and I knew the clip was going to perform on LinkedIn.
There was one problem. The photo of us at the mic looked great — except for the chaos behind me. A corkboard covered in someone else's flyers. A half-eaten lunch on a side table. The back of another guest's laptop sticking into the frame.
Beautiful subject. Distracting everything-else.
So I opened Photoshop.
Twenty-three minutes later, I was still fighting the magnetic lasso tool. I'd masked around my arm three times — each time losing a piece of my shirt collar or accidentally grabbing a slice of the wall texture behind me. I was about to start over a fourth time when I caught myself: I'm a marketer. I'm not a graphic designer. Why am I burning thirty minutes on something this basic?
I'd been hearing creators talk about Adobe Express for months. I'd ignored it. Photoshop was the "real" tool, I told myself. Adobe Express was for people who didn't know what they were doing.
I opened it anyway, out of frustration. Dragged my photo in. Clicked Remove Background. Eight seconds later, I had a clean isolated photo. I pulled in a plain navy backdrop. Total time from import to export: under two minutes.
The LinkedIn post went up that night. Got 312,000 impressions in 72 hours.
That was the day I stopped fighting Photoshop for tasks that didn't need it.
The 30-minute trap most content creators fall into
You take a photo. It's a good one. You want to turn it into a LinkedIn post.
Then you open it up and realize: the background is too cluttered, the framing is off, the lighting could be tighter, and the whole thing needs a cleanup.
Two options. Either you open Photoshop, learn the masking tools, manually trace around yourself, and spend 20–30 minutes — or you pay a designer $50 to do it for you.
Both options eat your day. And if you're producing content daily, that's 5+ hours a week lost to photo editing that should take seconds.
Adobe Express turns the 30-minute version into a 30-second version. Here's exactly how.
5 steps to clean up a photo in 30 seconds
Step 1
Upload your image
Open Adobe Express. Click "Upload" and drop in your photo. No specific format requirements — JPG, PNG, or even iPhone HEIC works.
Behind the scenes: Adobe Express normalizes the file, strips metadata, and converts it into a working layer you can edit non-destructively.
Watch out for
Adobe Express limits uploads to 25MB on the free plan. If your camera files are bigger than that, downscale to 4096px on the longest edge before uploading. Quality stays sharp for social, file size drops by 60%.
Step 2
Find the Remove Background tool
In the left sidebar, click "Photos & Quick Actions." Select "Remove Background." Adobe Express's AI analyzes the photo and identifies the subject — that's you — automatically.
Behind the scenes: a segmentation model trained on millions of images detects edges most masking tools miss (hair, glasses, hand outlines).
Watch out for
The Remove Background tool sits in the Quick Actions menu, not in the main toolbar. New users miss this and assume the feature isn't free. It is.
Step 3
Let the AI isolate you from the background
In about 5 seconds, Adobe Express removes everything except you. The background disappears. The clutter is gone. You're isolated on a transparent layer.
Behind the scenes: this is the step that used to take 20+ minutes of manual masking in Photoshop. The AI is doing the boring work.
Watch out for
The AI struggles with fine hair edges and earring outlines. Always zoom to 200% after the auto-remove and use the Refine brush to clean up edges manually. Skipping this is the difference between a clean cutout and an obviously AI'd photo.
Step 4
Keep what matters
Here's the trick: I didn't want the whole background gone — I wanted to keep the whiteboard behind me because that's where the value is. Adobe Express lets you selectively bring elements back. I cropped the whiteboard, placed it behind my isolated layer, and removed everything else.
Behind the scenes: layer compositing in the browser, no Photoshop install, no roundtrip. The whiteboard becomes its own layer you can resize and reposition.
Watch out for
Adobe Express defaults to RGB color space. If you're exporting for print or for ads that get repurposed across platforms, switch to sRGB in the export settings. RGB photos look slightly off on some LinkedIn skins.
Step 5
Reposition, resize, export
A few quick adjustments — drag, scale, align. Hit "Download" and export at LinkedIn-ready dimensions (1200×627 or 1080×1080, depending on placement). Done.
Behind the scenes: Adobe Express has the LinkedIn sizes baked in as templates, so you don't have to look up the spec sheet.
Watch out for
The 1080x1080 LinkedIn default export looks pixelated on Retina displays. Export at 2160x2160 for sharper rendering on modern screens, then let LinkedIn compress on upload. Yes it counts against your storage. It's worth it.
The 5-hour-per-week problem this solves
If you're posting daily on LinkedIn — or anywhere else — you're probably editing 5–10 images per week. At 20 minutes each, that's 100–200 minutes lost to photo editing. Roughly 5 hours.
Five hours per week. Twenty hours per month. Forty work-days a year.
The tools available to content creators in 2026 are different than they were in 2019. You don't need Photoshop. You don't need a graphic designer on retainer. You need a fast, AI-powered editor that handles the boring parts so you can focus on the actual content.
Adobe Express is what I use to do this — and after testing every alternative I could find, it's still the fastest workflow I've personally found.
What this looks like in actual numbers
Before Adobe Express, I was producing roughly 5 LinkedIn posts a week — most of them with a photo. Average time spent fighting Photoshop per post: 25 minutes. That's 125 minutes per week. About 8 hours per month. Roughly 96 hours per year of my time disappearing into masking layers, magnetic lasso retries, and background cleanup.
After Adobe Express, the same workflow takes 2 minutes per post. Five posts a week × 2 minutes = 10 minutes per week. About 40 minutes per month. Roughly 8 hours per year.
That's 88 hours of my time given back. Two full work weeks. Just from one tool replacing another.
The engagement side is harder to attribute — a clean photo isn't the only variable on a post's performance. But across the last 60 days, my LinkedIn posts with cleaned-up imagery have averaged roughly 23% higher reach than the ones I shipped with cluttered backgrounds. Not life-changing on its own. But layered onto a daily posting cadence, it compounds.
What I tried before Adobe Express
I didn't land on Adobe Express because of marketing. I landed on it because every other option broke down at scale.
Photoshop was my starting point. It's the gold standard for a reason — total control, every layer, every adjustment. But at 5 posts a week, the overhead kills you. The 23-minute background-cleanup story from earlier wasn't an outlier. It was a Tuesday.
Canva felt closer to what I needed. Better templates, faster onboarding. But Canva's background remover was locked behind Canva Pro, and even then, the AI struggled with hair, glasses, and any photo where the lighting wasn't perfect. I'd run a cleanup, get jagged edges around my collar, redo it twice. The free tier was unusable for the format I actually needed.
Remove.bg solved the cutout problem cleanly. Fast, accurate, easy. But it ended there. No templates. No brand kit. No way to drop my isolated photo onto a backdrop. I was bouncing between three tools to finish a single LinkedIn post — Remove.bg for the cutout, Canva for the layout, Photoshop for any text overlays. Twenty-five minutes turned into thirty-five.
Picsart promised an all-in-one. Decent on mobile. But the desktop experience felt like an afterthought, and the templates leaned toward consumer use cases — birthday cards, Instagram stories. Not B2B LinkedIn.
Adobe Express was the first tool that combined background removal, brand kit, templates, and export presets without making me pick three separate apps. That's the only reason I switched.
Beyond background removal
Templates for every social platform
Pre-sized for LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. No more looking up dimensions.
Brand kit
Saves your colors, fonts, and logos so every post matches without thinking about it.
AI text generation
Write copy directly inside the design. Headlines, captions, alt text — generated in-context.
Quick Actions library
Resize, convert, crop, remove background, animate — all in one panel. The 30-minute jobs become 30-second jobs.
Try Adobe Express
Sponsored link — see disclosure above.
Adobe Express
SPONSOREDFAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
New series
This is Episode 1
This is the first in a new series I'm calling I Just Saved 30 Minutes — a collection of tactical workflows where I show you exactly how I cut content production time without sacrificing quality.
What should I cover next? Drop a comment on the YouTube video. Common ones I'm planning include:
- How to turn a long-form video into 10 vertical clips in 5 minutes
- How to write 20 LinkedIn posts from one podcast episode
- How to design a complete brand kit in 10 minutes
- How to repurpose a YouTube video into a newsletter, blog post, and carousel — in under an hour
The series will live on BestStacked.com and on YouTube. New episode every two weeks.
From the author of The End of Marketing
The strategy layer behind the tools
Carlos's bestselling book — subtitled Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI — covers the broader theme behind this series: how creators win in 2026 by being fast, real, and human. Tools like Adobe Express are the execution layer. The book is the strategy layer.
Get The End of Marketing on Amazon →About the author
Carlos Gil
Marketing thought leader, LinkedIn Top Voice, bestselling author of The End of Marketing, and Editor-in-Chief of BestStacked.com (AI tools) and BestSends.com (email infrastructure).
More from Carlos →Episode 1 of a new sub-series within the broader Adobe Express series