Start from the crop
- Head and shoulders — idle, portrait or camera-motion templates.
- Half body — turn and pose templates; keep hands in frame or fully hidden, never half-cropped.
- Full body, wide — low-magnitude camera moves only; expect limb artefacts.
Then the light
Templates tuned to hard directional light will look wrong on a flat, evenly lit photo, and vice versa. Match the template's apparent light to your source before you match its mood.
Then the background
Plain backgrounds tolerate high-magnitude templates. Detailed interiors — shelves, plants, patterned walls — should push you toward a static camera, because every moving pixel of background is a pixel the model must re-decide.
The three-attempt rule
Give the pairing three attempts. If the same artefact appears three times, the photo and the template are mismatched. Move to the next lower magnitude family rather than rerolling the same one.
Keep a pairing log
Note photo type, template family and outcome. After two weeks the log becomes a lookup table, and you stop paying to rediscover what already works for your own material.