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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We have some of the most beautiful skyscapes here on the west coast. Sometimes having a few clouds in the sky really makes quite a picture.

The day was perfect with light clouds scattered through a blue sky. The sun was beaming though, creating a great picture-perfect moment.

I took some shots for anyone who’s in need of skyscapes. Technically not textures but close!

File downloads after the jump.

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