Why Your Composites Look Fake (And the Lighting Logic That Fixes Them)

I spent six months studying how light behaves on water for a single album cover. Not six weeks. Six months. I pulled reference images, shot my own footage at different times of day, watched documentaries about ocean cinematography, and filled an entire sketchbook with notes about reflection angles and subsurface scattering. The final image took four days to composite. The six months were the real work. That kind of obsession probably sounds excessive.