I have done background removal myself, and when the image size is reduced a lot the result is okay, but it's not brilliant (I did it with the dandelions on my current battlemap, but I had to assemble them from images in a bunch of places with a usable license, which is why I considered photographing some weeds). I recently upgraded from Photoshop 7 to Photoshop CS2 (which is available as a free download now, but it's a lot less stable than PS7 bizarrely enough).