The Edge That Kills Your Composite: A Working Artist's Guide to Masking That Actually Holds Up

The Halo You Don’t See Until It’s Too Late I had a deadline once, a book cover with a model pulled from a studio shoot and dropped into a mountainous landscape. The light matched. The color grading was dialed. The client approved it on a Thursday afternoon and it went to print by Friday morning. Three days later, I opened the file to archive it and noticed it immediately: a thin, pale halo sitting along the model’s left shoulder like a ghost of the original background.