A Massive Waste of Time

So I wasted a lot of my own time today. As I stated earlier, I was going add a picture of coal to my magazine cover. Because I don't live next to a coal mine, I had to take landscaping rocks from my backyard. I painted the rocks black and then placed them on a white envelope under the sun. My goal was to create a large enough background of sheer white in order to use the paint splash tool and eliminate the background. I did so, however, there was still a large amount of white space in the picture. I zoomed in and painstakingly filled in the white space for an hour. After adding t to my word doc, I found that the shade of gray I used to fill in the space was slightly darker than my cover background. After playing around on Word I discovered that there is a background removing tool built in that works phenomenally. So the first two hours of producing this photo were unnecessary. I've included a process photo and the finished product in the post.