Why Your Composites Look Fake: The Masking Mistakes Nobody Talks About

The first time I delivered a finished composite to a client, I stared at it for an hour before hitting send. Not because I was proud of it. Because something was wrong and I couldn’t name it. The subject was cleanly cut out. The color grading matched. The lighting looked plausible. But the image felt like a collage, not a photograph. It took me another year of work before I understood what I was actually looking at: the edges.