Forgotten

[Lady of the Lake]

(Plants are TG3 presets; rake by Uncle808us; shed by kessiah; bushes by Walli; trees by X-Frog) 

Thanks for looking.

[yossam]

I think you need to change the lighting............needs some shadows. 

[kaedorg]

You could use a more dramatic lightning to increase the forgotten feeling

Looking forward. Nice project indeed.

David

[Lady of the Lake]

Changed the lighting and the AA.  Tweaked a few other things.  Tried to make the roof better, hope I succeeded.  Still not satisfied with it.

Thanks everyone for your help....always appreciated.

[choronr]

A lot of good elements here in very good places. Then, the lighting; suggest you take the sun to the upper right corner and elevate it to about 30 degrees ...see what happens and experiment.

[mhaze]

ditto.  Gets better every time I look!

[TheBadger]

Great pallet yet again. But I don't understand why it looks so flat. Whats happening here? The sun was moved, but that did not do much of anything. Is some box not ticked? Perhaps something with shadows?

[Lady of the Lake]

I don't know.  I have moved the sun around a bunch but it does not seem to get much better.  I tried what Bob said (above)...result was the image was darker but not better.   What shadow box might I have left "unchecked"?       

[choronr]

Try posting your .tgd Lyla. A lot of folks will jump in with some ideas.

[gregtee]

My feeling is that there's too much ambient light overall.  The shadow areas seem to be gathering a lot of environment lighting that's lifting the low end values.  This makes the whole image seem washed out and flat, so it won't really matter where you place your sun since the result will still be an overall lifted image.  You could try post processing the image by lowering the gamma a bit but I think that your shadow and key areas are too close together to really make that trick work. 

-Greg

[zaxxon]

Another approach might be to start without the cloud layers and reduce the haze level significantly. Then set your lighting from that base to get the composition and feel you want, then incrementally add back haze and cloud layers till you like the result.

[Upon Infinity]

I'd say the solution is to reduce your GI Strength on Surfaces.  And, perhaps, bring the haze down a bit.

[Lady of the Lake]

I played around with everyone's suggestions and came up with this.  Not sure it is better or not.....it is darker than I had it pictured in my mind but it was the only way I seemed able to get the shadows.  Maybe I needed more sunlight......but I am tired of re-rendering this.  So am calling it finished.   Thanks everyone.    I even learned about a button I never knew was there (camera exposure), so I am glad for that.  :-)

Big thanks to everyone for taking the time to help.

[choronr]

This is a good improvement. I think the sun's strength default is 5. Maybe try a 7 and make a cropped section to see the result. Also try that slider on the left side of the preview window that will give more/less contrast/brightness.

[gregtee]

If you bring this into Photoshop or some image editing software I'll bet you could just pull the gamma down and it'll look much richer as the shadow areas fall and the saturation increases.

Looks a lot better.