Thanks for the help and tips guys. Yeah, most of the pictures are from either old renders or very fast test renders, which is why most of them are missing shadows, etc. But i needed them as brightness tests to see where i need to set the level of brightness on my monitor to match those of lcd's, which seem to be much brighter. I need to see what you guys are seeing before i can do any lighting fixes =P

My video card comes with a brightness/contrast control. My monitor is default at 100% brightness/contrast, which is still darker than most modern day lcd's, and after calibration it says to reduce it to 90%. So i'm using the sliders that come with my video card. I have those set at 75-80% brightness and the contrast set at 50%, and this seems to reproduce exactly what i see on a friends lcd, and is in line with all your comments. Like if you said it had too much contrast, i saw that now, or if an image was washed out, i could see it, whereas i couldn't before. Is this brightness/contrast setting good enough? Keep in mind i'm doing this mostly as a hobby, not going for professional looks or perfection. I just want to produce decent images. But at this setting, it's slightly darker than the brightest lcd's, but lighter than darker monitors. I needed to find a middle ground so the renders will look decent for those with bright monitors and dark ones.

vilters: I was testing out bagginbills enviroment dome before. I set an HDR image in the dome, and one infinite light, and it comes out nice, but it doesn't get a shadow on the ground, because the background is the full image. Is there a way i can use a scene of props with a ground/maybe some walls, trees, etc along with bagginbills dome without the HDR picture itself taking the whole background? And do i always have to decrease the Focal length of the camera to make the image clearer? I'm still new to using his dome.