The Image You Pick Will Make or Break Your Composite Before You Open Photoshop

I once spent eleven hours trying to fix a sky replacement that should have taken forty-five minutes. The problem wasn’t my blending technique or my masking. It was that I had grabbed a sky shot with a focal length of roughly 24mm and dropped it into a scene photographed at 85mm. The compression was completely wrong. The clouds looked pasted on, because they were pasted on, in every optical sense that matters.