careful with your lighting. Rim lighting only should happen if something is lit from the back. Your blue light source is coming from the side so you should have more of the side light up.
Definitely has some awesome potential. Try looking at pictures of cliffs and mountains to help your piece look even more like the cliffy-cloud effect you have going.
Updated the image, let me know if the newer blue lighting on the blocks is an improvement or not!
I've also brightened the image slightly, this is because a lot of the lighting features appeared to only be visible in Photoshop, when I put them online the darkness seemed to consume a lot of the detail; if anybody knows why this is happening and what I should do to avoid this without having to brighten up the image help would be greatly appreciated!
I like the glistening affect in the upper left a lot. Cool stuff.
Not sure about the darkening, I know that happens to a lot of people. Might be an affect of how the browser renders the image. Does it happen across all browsers?
I think the problem is that web browsers use colors differently. I had a great site that showed the difference between colors in programs vrs colors online and which were "safe" to use for web browsers but I can't find it at the moment.
I would recommend you start laying some textures in. What dimensions and dpi are you using for this project?
PurgeandFire: I agree I prefer that blue also, the colour adjusting I had to do to brighten the 3rd edit caused me to lose that vibrance but I'll try and bring it back in the next iteration.
Looking a lot better! I would recommend for future projects to upsize the dimensions and paint at like 50%. When you go to add detail later you just zoom to 100% and it looks much higher quality.
Yeah this is the second time I've managed to do this (luckily people aren't asking for a wallpaper this time ) I will stick to higher dimensions next time!
Also, as Whitesock suggested, work with a canvas that has bigger dimensions than your goal size, then shrink it down. It helps a lot. Another advice, work with 16 bit RGB documents, not 8 bit. Then gradients will go a lot smoother, especially if, when saving for sharing, you save as a 16 bit PNG. A lot of those pesky lines in the gradients will disappear!
I don't think I'm dealing with quite the same pressures though, at the very least its a significantly smaller system. For the time being I'm just going to put together a quick scrubby box though and hope it works good enough to not make my house toxic
I do know this - xenforo dropped the ball by not keeping the vbulletin reputation comments as a feature. The loss of the Reputation comments data when we switched to Xenforo really was the death knell for the site when it came to all the users that left. I know I missed it so much and I got way less interested in the site when that feature was gone and I run the site.