Patience and time required

Adding the human element in a scene, if it's done well, adds a focal point and a center of interest. This remarkable stone staircase in Bikaner Fort in Rajasthan, India offered a strong, graphic shot with dynamic diagonal lines. It made a beautiful photography by itself, but I thought it would be a lot more interesting with an attractive subject introduced. With a lot of patience and time, I made 40 to 50 individual selections in the latticework of the ornate railing using the pen tool. The magic wand tool, which most Photoshop users would prefer to use because it's so much faster, just wouldn't have given me the precise selection I needed. I then pasted the woman behind the railing, sized her correctly, and moved her into place. To place a clipboard image behind something, first you make the selection of the space or spaces into which the subject will be placed. Then feather the edge by one pixel (Select < modify > feather), and finally use Edit > paste special > paste into. Now click the move tool and move it into place. If you need to adjust the size of the subject, do that here: Edit > transform > scale.