The Blue Ghost Problem: How Clipping Masks Eliminate Edge Fringe in Photoshop Composites

There is a specific kind of failure that only bothers other compositors. Everyone else looks at the image and sees a person standing in front of a background. You look at it and see a thin halo of wrong color bleeding around every strand of hair like a ghost that refuses to leave the frame. I have shipped work with fringe I wasn’t happy with. Not often, but enough to know it’s one of those details that separates a composite that reads as real from one that reads as assembled.