Photo Manipulation
Why Your Photo Composites Look Fake (And the Luminosity Trick That Fixes Them)
I spent three days on a composite last year. Three days. The brief was simple enough: put a model into a moody, overcast cityscape. I rebuilt the sky twice, ran probably forty iterations of color grading, and kept feeling like something was off in a way I couldn’t name. The edges were fine. The colors were close. But the model looked like a cardboard cutout someone had glued onto a postcard.