What is missing?

Well in this particular pic, i think its atmosphere. you have a nice scene, but the lighting is pretty bland. adding some dramatic shadows would make it a lot more appealing.

I cant really pick out any shadows here.

Are you using dazstudio or Poser?
Tweaking material settings would help it pop out as well.

adding a small amount of ambience to the skin/clothes/horse will also get rid of the "black bottoms" where there's no light source. ( bottom of the horse's chest, under girl's chin )

I use DAZ studio, but I don't know how to tweak materials. I assume you mean the clothing material? I would love to be able to make my own textures for clothes etc, but I haven't a clue how.

I still struggle with the lighting and shadows, always end up looking daft lol.

i think some dramatic lighting like Vex said could really pop this. right now the only thing that brings focus to her is the red on all the cooler colors, but the eye isn't really DRAWN to her. some post worked light beams along with deepening the colors could really make her stand out and become the focus. Also you could try a depth of field kind of focus and with her the crispest it would bring focus to her.

the surfaces tab in DS gives you access to the material settings - not so much the texture, but the different effects like specular, ambience, etc. give me a sec and i'll post some screenshots ;)

to bring up the surfaces options



you can dock the surfaces window to the content/scene window, just click ont he surfaces tab and drag it next to it.

make sure you have the advanced tab selected.

in the top part of the surfaces window you have each mat zone listed. you can select multiple zones at a time by shift-clicking them.

so to start, select lip - toenails for V4 :
then you can increase the ambience on all the mat zones at once. a nice dark red is great for human skin.



playing around with the specularity will also help bring out some depth in your girl's skin.

adding ambience to the horse's mat will also help the black shadows there underneath.

are you using shadows on your lights? if you select a light in your scene tab you'll be able to add raytraced or depth map shadows.

my basic DS mat settings:

Diffuse

Color: 255 255 255
Strength: 100%

Specular

Glossiness: 70%
Color: 92 112 173
Strength: 20%

Ambient

Color: 94 57 39
Strength: 55%

Lighting Model: Plastic

are you using shadows in the image?

Nope, didnt use shadows yet

OK, I used Vex's settings to see what it came out like (thanks Vex :) ) I did put shadows in, and changed the lighting a little too. Also made the red of her clothes deeper.

Still no post work atm, but she'll have some kind of spell effect in her hand and I'm gonna try paint a wee light in the staff.

i cant see any shadows at all still :/

i think darkening the background up will bring her more into focus, right now there's a lot to look at.

you can use spot lights to point at the girl/horse and adjust their angle to shed more light around them, intead of using infinite lights

the horse looks much better without the black chest. overall a good improvement ;)

Hmm, I don't know why the shadows arent showing.

I also don't know how to do the field of depth thing.

try lowering the intensity of the directional light in front of her a bit and behind, they might be washing out the shadows too much to see.

I would like to have this stickied OMGZ, I have referred back to this for Vex's surface advice like 20 times LOL.

Lol, its totally changed my pics, huuuuuge difference now. <3 Vex

lol yw guys ;)