Why Your Composites Look Fake (And It's Not the Lighting)

The Thing That Was Missing From Every Early Composite I Made For the first few years of my career, I kept producing work that looked almost right. Movie poster concepts, book cover drafts, album art mockups. The lighting matched. The color grades were locked in. The shadows were (mostly) going the right direction. But something was off, and clients could feel it even when they couldn’t name it. The work looked assembled.