Compositing is one of those skills that separates the people who use Photoshop from the people who know Photoshop. I learned that the uncomfortable way a few years back when a friend sat down at my machine, looked at a composite I’d spent three days on, and rebuilt something better in about twenty minutes using techniques I’d never seen. That stung. A lot. Since then I’ve made it a point to watch how other working designers approach the problem, even when I think I’ve got it figured out.

This tutorial from Kelvin Designs does a good job of walking through the full composite pipeline, start to finish, using a cowboy photo against a dramatic background. It’s not just “cut the guy out and slap him on a background.” There are three distinct phases here, and each one matters.

Getting a Clean Extraction Without Losing the Details That Matter

The first phase is extraction, and Kelvin doesn’t phone it in here. He starts with Select > Subject, which does a surprisingly decent first pass, but the real work happens after that in Select and Mask.

Inside Select and Mask, the key moves are: set the View Mode to On Black or On White so you can actually see where your edges are falling apart, then use the Refine Edge Brush tool on any areas with hair, fringe, or texture complexity. For the cowboy hat brim and any flyaway hair, you paint over those edges with the Refine Edge Brush and let Photoshop do the heavy lifting on the transition pixels. The Radius in the Edge Detection settings should be kept tight (think 2-5px) unless you’re dealing with a subject against a very clean background. Feather stays at 0. Contrast gets bumped slightly to sharpen soft edges back up.

The output goes to a Layer Mask, not a new layer. That distinction matters because a mask is non-destructive. You can always go back in and paint corrections with a black or white brush at 100% hardness for hard edges, lower hardness for areas that need a softer blend.

If the initial mask has fringe, the Decontaminate Colors option in Select and Mask helps remove color bleed from the original background, but use it carefully. It bakes changes into the pixels, which means it’s slightly more destructive than a pure mask approach.

Matching the Color So Your Subject Doesn’t Look Like a Cutout

This is the phase that most beginner composites skip, and it’s why most beginner composites look terrible. Kelvin works through color matching using a combination of adjustment layers clipped to the subject layer.

The approach is to sample the overall color temperature and tone of the background and nudge the subject to match. A Curves adjustment layer clipped to the subject (hold Alt and click between the adjustment layer and the subject layer to clip it) lets you push warmth into shadows or shift the midtone hue toward whatever your background is doing. For this particular composite with a warm, dusty Western background, that means pulling the blue channel down slightly and adding warmth in the red and green channels.

A Color Balance adjustment layer works well alongside Curves here, specifically the Shadows and Midtones sliders. If the background is pulling warm-orange, push the subject’s shadows toward that same temperature. The goal is not to make them identical. It’s to make them feel like they were lit by the same source.

Selective Color is another tool Kelvin uses to target specific color ranges in the subject, especially useful if the subject’s skin tones or clothing are fighting the background palette.

The Creative Adjustments That Make Everything Feel Unified

This is the part that’s harder to quantify but makes the biggest perceptual difference. Kelvin adds a few global adjustment layers sitting above everything in the layer stack, not clipped to any single layer, so they affect the whole composition.

A subtle Color Lookup adjustment with a film-grade LUT can unify the palette fast. The opacity usually gets dialed back to somewhere between 30-60% depending on how strong the LUT is. Gradient Maps set to soft light or multiply blending modes at low opacity (10-20%) push the overall color story in a direction without overwhelming anything.

He also adds subtle light and shadow that matches the background’s lighting direction. A Curves layer with a mask painted to affect only the subject, darkening the side that faces away from the background’s key light source, does more for realism than almost anything else. If the background light is coming from top right, the subject should be slightly brighter on the top right and fall off on the left.

Where I’d Push This Further (or Do It Differently)

Everything Kelvin covers here is solid. My one addition for any composite where the subject and background have very different sharpness or focal quality: match the depth-of-field feel. If the background has slight lens blur, a very gentle Smart Filter Gaussian Blur on the subject at maybe 0.3-0.5px pulls it into the same optical space. It sounds too subtle to matter. It isn’t.

Where this approach hits a wall is with subjects photographed under hard artificial light being placed into softly lit natural backgrounds. Color matching can get you part of the way there, but the shadow quality will still fight you. That’s more of a source-photo problem than a Photoshop problem. Shoot to match your background, or find backgrounds that match your shot.

The One Thing That Actually Makes Composites Work

Composites fall apart at the extraction and get saved or killed by color. You can spend hours on a perfect mask and wreck it with a 10-minute lazy color pass. Treat the color matching phase as seriously as the cutting phase and the whole image starts to hold together.

Watch the full Kelvin Designs tutorial for the visual step-by-step, including the specific settings and layer arrangements he builds out. Reading about curves is useful. Watching someone actually move the sliders is faster.