Why Your Composites Look Almost Right — And the Lighting Logic That Fixes Them

The Moment the Illusion Breaks I have a folder on my desktop called “failures.” I open it once a month, not to punish myself, but because growth looks invisible until you stack it against your worst work. The folder goes back nine years. Early on, the problems were obvious: bad masking, colors that didn’t belong to the same universe, subjects that looked like they were floating six inches above the ground they were supposed to be standing on.