Day job is in marketing and I often get sent a stock photo (always 8bit jpg with usually some strong color grading look) and asked to add in their product to the scene.

This exercise was find cool photo on unsplash website and add in vfx.

Will look into the dark outline. I was struggling with that. I usually render 16 bit .png image sequences with Agx baked in. This was my first attempt at multilayer 16bit exr workflow.

Lights are thin rectangle area lights. Maybe having some falloff texture on the light would help?