A hand-driven technique for making a cut-out element look physically present in its new environment: eyedropper-sample colors directly from the scene's ground and sky, then hand-paint that sampled light onto the subject as if it were reflecting off it. Used repeatedly across a single composite — turning nearby rock photos into believably distant mountains, integrating a foreground animal, and integrating cut-out people (whose original ground, sand, is matched to the new terrain so the light plane already lines up before color work starts).
This is the manual analog of Harmonize: AI Lighting/Color Match for Composites (Firefly Model 3) — same goal (match a composited element's light/color to its new surroundings) reached by hand sampling + brush painting instead of an AI model call. The brush mechanics for applying the sampled color (constraining paint to highlight/shadow/color ranges) are covered in Hand Painting via Blend-Mode Targeting (Highlights/Shadow/Color).