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| Costa Rican salt worker resting at mid-day |
A group of birding enthusiasts stand around this Costa Rican salt pond worker; they are asking him if they can walk around the ponds looking for unusual birds. He's agreeable so I also asked him if I could take his photo.
The portrait is well exposed ( the worker was looking right into the camera, Kodak DX3900), but the background is an uninteresting mixture of debris and birder’s legs. I took a photo of the salt ponds to replac the background of the portrait.
The photoshop workflow for the project was the following:
- Load the salt pond photo into Photoshop CC. This will be the base layer.
- Duplicate the base layer and adjust with the basic panel of Photoshop Raw Filter.
- Load the salero’s portrait and crop out the background.
- Copy and paste the cropped portrait to a new layer in the salt pond photo.
- Select the portrait, move to the lower right, and free transform for size.
- Add an adjustment layer to the portrait to adjust exposure of his face (mostly the eyes).
- Discard the unused base layers and save the active layers as a tiff file.
- Flatten image, smart sharpen and save for web.
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| Costa Rican salt worker with the salt pond in the background (composite photo). |
Carto
Costa Rica is a tourist destination known for its abundance of birds; many of which are not seen in the United States. 'Sal' is the Costa Rican word for salt, and a ‘salero’ is a worker in a salt evaporation pond. The salt ponds are located on the Pacific coast in the dry/arid northwest region.
I noticed (after I posted, of course) that there are some interesting white pen trails coming out of the salt worker's hat. It's easy to make photo editing mistakes, with the selection and pen tools.
