Sinking Fish Into Water: A Photoshop Compositing Breakdown Worth Stealing

There’s a specific kind of problem that keeps showing up in compositing work: you have two images that are technically compatible, same general lighting direction, similar color temperature, reasonable resolution match, but the moment you stack them together, something reads as fake. The eye knows, even when it can’t explain why. I’ve spent years chasing that gap between “placed” and “integrated,” and underwater composites are where the gap is widest. Water scatters light, shifts color, adds depth haze and particulate, and demands that anything living inside it carry all of that information on its surface.