Precision Tree Removal

I want to give a shout-out to one of the hand full of retouchers we work with at Precision Backdrops, Brian Williams, owner of Crossboard Creative in TN, who helped us with this project.

Main shooting vantage.

It is not uncommon for us to have to produce backdrops for a show that takes place in the spring, but, due to the production time required for a backdrop, we have to photograph it in late winter or early spring. This can create a problem since the trees will be bare with no leaves. Occasionally, we will be asked to add leaves to the trees, however this is a fairly expensive endeavor. So, in a lot of cases the production decides to keep the scene as is and add their own trees on the set, which adds depth. Of course this only works if there are not any trees in the drop that would be close to the set in real life. In those situations, the leafless tree needs to be removed in post. This is the exact situation we found ourselves in on a recent project a month ago.

For a second floor backyard view we were producing in the suburbs, there was a bare maple tree about 6 feet from the foundation of the house we were in. For this production, this house was going to be used as a shooting location from May through early July, so this tree was going to be in bloom. For the sound stage, the production was going to place a fake maple tree in place of it for depth. Or course, for this to work, the tree needed to be removed from the backdrop. Fortunately we knew this going in, which was a great help.

In order to make the retouching as easy and accurate as possible, I arrived with two tripods. One was a main tripod for the overall image. The second tripod I used from a few different vantages capturing as many different parts of the scene without the tree in the way. The garage and the wooden fence were of most concern, but the ground and neighboring backyard also needed to be documented. This gave Brian lots of options to work with when editing out the tree.

Overall, I think it took Brian about 6 hours to “Photoshop” out the tree, which came out looking better than expected.

After this, we touched up the sky a bit and made a night-from-day conversion for the night image. We were there all day and did manage to capture the true to night, but only used it to drop in the highlights and the orange glow of the artificial light, being careful to mask out any of the tree from the true night version. To finish, we did some light painting onto the night-from-day version where the tree was removed using the true night as guidance.