Lighting a Giant Elephant

A technique for matching the lighting between a subject and its background.
Matching the Light

If you're like me, every now and then you find yourself needing to insert a subject image into a background where the lighting between the two doesn't quite match. Your subject image may be flatly lit, while your background contains crisp shadows and highlights -- and if you don't correct the problem you run the risk of getting a load of critical comments.

Often times the wisest thing to do is to keep hunting for source images where the lighting does match. But sometimes you can effectively fix lighting problems and an example of how do to this can be seen in the giant elephant image named One Way Street.

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