Shadownet, Lighting serves many functions. First, you must decide what your image is supposed to DO, then you'll know how to light it. Light indicates environment. Stark neon with bleak shadows? The viewer is on some mean streets. Greenish shifting ripples with vague shadows? Underwater at a particular depth. Orienting the viewer is a good thing. The environmental clues can be social or temporal or spatial, but lighting helps fix that point. Light indicates mood. There is a lot which can be done with the psychology of color. Red and yellow are danger colors to western eyes (used for signaling flags among other things). Red and yellow and black explosions make a viewer nervous. Blue is a hard color to focus upon, and the eye might linger more rather than jump around: blues, purples, greens are recessive, calming colors to our eyes. A soft purple glow is probably not dangerous... unless you are about to be ensorcelled by a maiden's smile. Colored lights should be used sparingly unless you are going for the impact. Contrasting colors on alternate sides will give a figure depth, but if all your iamges use that technique, it becomes a cliche and not a tool. Decide if you are being playful or aggressive or whatever with your image, and choose colors to further that goal. Light guides the eye. YOU determine what the viewer sees in your image, and what the viewer sees first! The direction of travel of the eye is well-documented. Example 1: You fill a cave with all the golden items in the Marketplace and use global lighting so that the viewer can see them all in radiant glory. The eye takes in a glittery mess and jumps away. If you had used a spotlight or one of the torch/candle props and upped the lighting, you could have the viewer see your hero isolated against the dark and the trail of sparkles leading directly to the gleam in the old dragon's eye. Uh-oh. The pinpricks of light on all the treasure and the dragon's scales add textural richness, but diminishing the overall light level means that you control what is seen and when. The eye goes to the area of greatest contrast first. This is almost always a contrast of light and dark. It can be detail, it can be focus, it can be color, but it is usually light. If you have a bright happy outdoors scene, you don't want dark shadows. Black ambient color in the shadowed skin of healthy people makes them look deader than a victim in a shooter. Use a global or HDRI setup to get the effect of natural bounced light and perhaps color it a bit if the surfaces which would be reflecting the light warrant it. If your figures are against red rock bluffs or floating in a turquoise pool under an even bluer sky, their skin will be picking up a bit of that color. Noon at a marble-lined manor-house? White light. Good lighting is effective: it reveals as much of the scene as you wish to reveal, directs the viewer's eye, establishes location, sets the mood, conveys the message. The use of light and shadow defines the world you create for the viewer. Carolly