Last September, I created an image for the International Compost Awareness Week poster contest. I planned to take a stock photo of a person cupping compost in their hands and having an actual tree (in small scale) growing from within the compost. I spent a lot of time looking for stock photos with trees on knocked-out backgrounds, but couldn’t find any I liked.

Instead, I decided on a stock image which seemed manageable to remove the background easily enough… Or so I thought at the time. My plan was to use the Pen Tool to create a Mask and remove it from the background. I realized quickly (well, actually not that quickly) that this particular item was way too complicated for the Pen Tool treatment.

Here's the Tree Stock Image I started with.

All I wanted was the tree; the sky and ground had to go, including the sky behind the tiny little branches. Now, because this was for a printed poster, the image is large, and has to be very detailed even when viewed close, so there wasn’t much room to fudge the details; I needed to remove the sky from behind each and every branch…

My first attempt was to use the Pen Tool and try to mask out the tree. But after 3 hours of work, this is all I had done…

Cellphone photo of Tree Mask using Pen Tool.

This was just ridiculous, at this rate I would have been masking out this tree for 6-7 hours and been less-than-satisfied with the final result; because of this, I gave up immediately on this method (scratch 3 hours from my life… but better to save the rest than continue on with a poor method).

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I got a new camera recently and decided to take a few minutes and play with a vase of flowers and a nice backdrop. I have 5 photos of Spring Flowers in bloom for you to download. Please comment and retweet if you like these.

All Photos are 3872 x 2176 pixels (16:9 aspect ratio), at 350 dpi (in sRGB).

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On the way to my kid’s school, there is an abandoned building with a really nice graffiti piece across the front. Today I decided to take some high-res photos of the graf for you to download to use as texture or stock photo.

I started by taking all the images I had taken, and used Photoshop to photo-merge them into a single panorama; the graf art is very wide.

[TIP] To Photo Merge many files into one, with all the files open inside Photoshop, click File -> Automate -> Photomerge and choose the type of layout, then click “Add open files” … The box will populate with the filenames of all open documents -> Click OK

I have the finished piece available in 300 dpi JPG image at 11,629 x 1,707 pixels, and the rest available in 3 separate sections in 2,500 pix wide, 300 dpi PNG files with transparent backgrounds.

Get Graffiti Wide JPG (340) 3MB
Get Graf 01 PNG (295) 4MB	Get Graf 02 PNG (290) 3MB	Get Graf 03 PNG (275) 3MB

Check out Media Militia for a great Graffiti Brushes/Texture resource.

I’ve been playing around, taking pictures of objects and I like the look of this Logitech Wireless mouse.

I decided to give away the full-resolution image as a Stock Photo for you to use.

The photo is 2329 x 1814 at 180 dpi (roughly 13 in wide x 10 in tall)

Download: Logitech_Stock_Photo (316) (985 KB ZIP)

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I was surprised recently when I couldn’t find any hi-res leather textures for a project that I was working on. As a result, I got my hands on some actual leather hides and started photographing them. I wanted to share these with others who may also need leather textures for one reason or another. I have 12 leather textures available in high-res JPG format available in a ZIP file, after the jump.

Please enjoy!

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