Challenge 2: Planning to Fix Poor Lighting Entirely in the Compositor — Solution Walkthrough

The answer:

Per this chapter's own warning box, this plan is likely to disappoint.
Compositing genuinely excels at combining, adjusting tone, and
refining an already-solid render — it has no ability to fix problems
that originate in the modeling, lighting, or animation the render was
actually built from. A genuinely poorly lit scene, ignoring Blender
Fundamentals' own three-point lighting recommendations, is exactly
this kind of foundational problem.

Why compositing can't fully compensate for bad lighting:

The Compositor works with whatever the render already produced — if
the original lighting failed to reveal a scene's own shape and
material properties clearly (per Blender Fundamentals' own Chapter 7
material), that missing information simply isn't present in the
rendered image for the Compositor to recover or invent afterward.
Color grading can shift overall tone, but it can't add shadow detail
or highlight information that was never captured in the first place.

Why this matches this chapter's own broader honesty theme:

Per this chapter's own material, this is the same honest boundary
already established elsewhere on this site — EQ can't rescue a
fundamentally weak audio recording, and outlining text can't fix a
wrong font choice. Compositing sits in that same category: a
refinement tool, not a rescue tool for foundational problems.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
------------------------------
This exercise checks that compositing's own limits are correctly
understood — genuinely poor lighting needs to be fixed at the lighting
stage, not compensated for entirely in post-processing.