Why Your Composites Look Fake (And the Lighting Logic That Fixes Them)

The Problem Nobody Talks About in Tutorials I’ve been doing this for fifteen years. Movie posters, book covers, album art. And the single most common mistake I see in composite work, from beginners and working professionals alike, is not a bad mask or a sloppy extraction. It’s lighting that tells two different stories at once. A subject photographed under a soft, overcast studio light gets dropped into a scene with a hard midday sun burning from camera left.