Why Your Composites Look Fake (And It's Not the Masking)

I once spent three days perfecting a mask around a model’s hair, getting every flyaway strand clean and precise, only to place her against a background and watch the whole thing fall apart. The edges were immaculate. The composite looked completely fake. The culprit wasn’t the mask. It was the color temperature of her skin sitting at 5600K against a background shot at 7200K. She looked like she’d been photographed on a different planet, because photographically, she had been.