I’ve spent years paying for Adobe’s tools, mostly because there are no real alternatives that can comprehensively match the feature set. And while several open-source alternatives have come close, there’s one feature that still has me reaching for Photoshop. That’s background removal. As a journalist on the internet, writing about tech, it’s a feature I use all too often, and every time I’ve switched to an offline editor or a free service, I run into one of three problems. Either the output quality was bad, or the process was painfully slow, or the service wanted me to upload my personal photos to a remote, and frankly, dubious-looking server. None of those trade-offs worked for me, especially when privacy is critical. I didn’t want my photos used for training an AI model or sold to data brokers. But lately, Adobe’s hefty subscription fee has been weighing heavily on me, and I decided it was time to find an alternative solution.