Why Your Composites Look Fake (And the Lighting Math That Fixes It)

The Moment a Composite Breaks There’s a moment every composite artist knows. You’ve spent hours pulling a subject off a background, color grading, adding atmosphere. You step back, squint at the screen, and something is wrong. Not catastrophically wrong. Just wrong enough that the image feels like a lie. Most viewers can’t name it. They just feel it. That feeling is almost always light. Light is the only thing that makes a composite believable.