I, too, would like some feedback on the original question - how to make things APPEAR dark, when they're not really so. My own 1st thought would be to make the scene fairly dim, with lowish contrast, but still bright enough to see easily. Then add some spurious additional (lighter) colour(eg. a lighted window; a "dusk" horizon; a (blueish) light from another room) - anything that fools the eye into thinking that the main scene is darker than it really is. Adding a lightish-grey (or gray) border might also help... (I think I'll go and experiment with those ideas myself, sometime soonish..) If you look at movies, they often use a similar technique, backlighting the figures with a blue light (which apparantly comes from nowhere). Whilst that can be got away with in movies, where the attention is on the action, not the lighting, stills would seem to need to be treated more subtly. Just a thought, and a hope that someone will come along with a tutorial:-)) Cheers, Diolma