AlphaForge 1.2.0

New: shadows and stickers

• Shadow step — a soft shadow under the cut-out, either on the ground (a contact shadow plus a soft ellipse, so the object sits on the surface) or a drop shadow (angle, distance, softness, colour). The canvas grows only as much as the shadow needs.
• Outline step — an even, round-cornered border around the cut-out, like a die-cut sticker. Thickness, smoothing (rounds inner corners and closes narrow gaps) and colour. The edge stays crisp at any setting.
• New Sticker preset — remove background, trim, white outline, soft drop shadow, PNG with alpha. Twelve presets in total.
• Background blur: new Focus range slider — choose how much of the scene around the subject stays sharp when the lens-like blur by distance is on.
• Warnings when Shadow or Outline are placed after a step that fills the background (they would have nothing to work on).

Under the hood

• Code audit of all 1.1–1.2 changes: the lens-like blur uses about 680 MB less memory on large photos, and picture backgrounds fill faster. Output is unchanged.

Everything runs locally; no new downloads are needed for shadows and stickers.

Installs over 1.0.x and 1.1.0; settings and downloaded models are kept. Not code-signed: SmartScreen → More info → Run anyway.
SHA-256: 120025ad74b22b6cabea48752336e0414f48c6a0d99176b86b760f824a5a9b9d

AlphaForge 1.1.0 — New backgrounds

New: put a new background behind the subject

The Background step (formerly Fill background) now has four modes:

• Colour — as before.
• Gradient — linear (any angle) or radial, dithered so it never bands.
• Picture — any image as the new background (fill or fit).
• Blur — keep the real background and blur it. Optional lens-like blur by distance (AI): things at the subject's distance — like the ground under its feet — stay sharp, the far background melts away, like a photo from a fast lens.

Plus a Darken slider and a new Blurred Background preset.

The depth-aware blur uses Depth Anything V2 Small (Apache-2.0, free for commercial use). It is an optional one-time 95 MB download from the authors' official repository at a pinned version, verified with SHA-256 — offered the first time you use it. Without it, the blur is applied evenly. ~0.2 s on an NVIDIA GPU, ~0.9 s on the CPU.

Installs over 1.0.x; settings and downloaded models are kept. Not code-signed: SmartScreen → More info → Run anyway.
SHA-256: a0bfaa7f034a0324c95c5b5b578326e27d0eb07d2dee3065c6e8b29b5b0149bd

AlphaForge 1.0.3

Fixes from a line-by-line code audit.

Robustness

• A damaged file that crashes an image decoder no longer closes the app; it shows an error for that file. The same protection covers previews, export and downloads, so none of them can get stuck.
• AVIF files that declare a gigantic image are rejected before decoding (they could use many GB of memory).
• Malformed server responses during the GPU pack download produce an error instead of a crash.

Quality

• PNG with reduced colours: cut-outs no longer get see-through speckles inside the subject.

Speed

• Changing a setting no longer waits for the output-size calculation of the previous preview (slow with PNG Max or AVIF).
• Export with "Skip existing files" skips them before processing (re-running a batch takes seconds instead of minutes).

Usability

• Copy result waits for the current preview instead of copying an older result.
• Ctrl+click adds to the current selection; dropping a folder plus a file inside it no longer adds the file twice; the 5000-files-per-add limit is announced.
• Keyboard: Space/Enter work on focused buttons and switches, Escape cancels typing in number fields.
• Clearer messages for errors that used to fail silently; JPG warning also covers transparency added after a fill.

Installs over 1.0.x; settings and downloaded models are kept. Not code-signed: SmartScreen → More info → Run anyway.
SHA-256: 7822ab2ac62483e803d10920d7ec311303e0f164ed85a202681d94cf7535345b

AlphaForge 1.0.2

Security, reliability and privacy fixes from a full audit.

Fixed

• Safe overwrite on export: overwriting a file can no longer lose the old one if writing fails, and no temporary files are left behind.
• Double-clicking Export or Download no longer shows misleading errors.
• Files removed from the list during loading or export no longer reappear; removed files are skipped instead of failing.
• Memory used by full-resolution previews is capped (~1 GB), e.g. after 4× upscales.
• WebView2 background networking is switched off: a full session opens no network connection at all.
• Startup error screen renders text safely; quieter log.

Installs over 1.0.x; settings and downloaded models are kept. Not code-signed: SmartScreen → More info → Run anyway.
SHA-256: 28143aea43a077d97299fbc86647c7bb647e5d6a61cfd73224d84b0c8d551cac

AlphaForge 1.0.1

Bug-fix release.

Fixed

• Preview stuck on "Processing" for fast presets without AI (Website Hero, Small WebP, Thumbnail, Compress): the result could finish before the app registered the request and was ignored.
• Export used the previous folder / prefix / conflict setting when you exported immediately after changing export options.

Download

AlphaForge_1.0.1_x64-setup.exe — Windows 10 (21H2+) / 11, 64-bit. Installs over 1.0.0; settings and downloaded models are kept.

The installer is not code-signed: if SmartScreen appears, click More info → Run anyway.
SHA-256: f506005ff3a01e6e7df46c7d0cc94be7e647c5525998ab052d0863cc4aaf2d1b

AlphaForge 1.0.0

First release. Windows 10/11 x64 installer (per-user, ~158 MB): background removal (BiRefNet), AI upscale (Real-ESRGAN), resize/trim/padding, PNG/JPG/WebP/AVIF, batch pipelines, English & Polish UI. Not code-signed — SmartScreen: More info → Run anyway. Optional NVIDIA GPU pack is installed from inside the app (Settings → AI & GPU).