Have you tried changing your mapsize? When your shadowmap is too small it may be too coarse to make accurate shadows. When I look at your settings, I see that in the ray-trace settings the blurradius is 0 and in the depthmapsettings it is 2.0 depthmapshadows are blurry by default. When you have a lot of small close objects giving shadows (like a plant) blurry shadows tend to overlap which results in darker shadows. For a crisp image it's better too use Ray-tracing, but you can first try to change the size of the shadowmap in the parametersettings.

regards,

Bopperthijs.

-How can you improve things when you don't make mistakes?