The Edge Is Everything: How Masking Actually Works (And Why Most Composites Fail At The Border)

I once spent forty minutes on a mask that covered maybe thirty pixels of image. It was a strand of hair crossing a bright window in a book cover composite, and the author’s photo had been shot against a gray studio backdrop. Nobody was going to zoom in on that strand. The art director certainly wasn’t going to. But I knew that if I left it soft and haloed with gray fringe, some part of my brain would register it as wrong every time I looked at the final piece, even if I couldn’t articulate why.