As I'm not an 'expert' by an stretch of the imagination in TG, I like your POV on this. Your water is pretty good, the only suggestions i can give you for that is what I did, practice, practice and more practice. I'd render sometimes five or six a day.. As to your surfacing, sometimes changing the gamma settings in your render control window helps 'deepen' the tones of this ... I also on occasion make the gamma deeper to deepen or enrich the tones of an image. But the gamma settings are so important that the first place you should change them is your render controls. A few more surfaces, perhaps as children would give you a bit more depth to the terrain. But the best suggestion is practice practice and more.. And don't be too down, I've never even gotten a vote on a single thing .. so I know it can be disenheartening, but it's also good practice when you see whom you are going up against :)

Couple of tips in addition to those given by Pat: Use less "bump" on surfaces; check your surface colors in a test render, your greens are very bright; render as big as possible and resize to increase resolution, then sharpen one step for clarity. Basically, you have the right idea, maybe some surface tutorials might give more insight in that direction. Keep up the good work!

Hi Caryn! I don't yet feel qualified to give any expert advice, so I'll write from my limited experience. I like the lighting, and the soft sky is very nice. If you'd like to give it more atmosphere, increase the haze setting to around 50 and play with the half-height..also the decay color and settings (horizon color)..maybe 35-50 with a half-height of 1500 and up. I use 3D clouds with a 2 or 3 depth/thickness and 20,000 to 100,000 for the sky size and maybe 11,000 to 25,000 for the altitude; 12/11 or 11/9 for the density contrast and density shift ratio. I haven't really gone crazy with the settings yet. I like your water, and the terrain is a great one. I use World machine for most of my terrains and build and/or edit some in Terraformer2. Like the others, I think your surfaces can use some work. I use maybe 4 or five layers for each gradient of colors and maybe 3 or 4 colors; have been trying to come up with complimentary mixes. I've been reminded that more is better when it comes to surface layering. Hope this ramble helps. Have fun! I look forward to seeing more of your work.

The tips given here are about what I'd say - try to be a bit more subtle with your surface layer colours and add some child layers (try using a wildly inappropriate colour to see where they fall and their coverage etc - you can then change the colour to suit your existing surface - this will give you some depth) I use this technique all the time and you know half the time the child layer isn't showing up at all (for some simple reason) and I would never have known had I not checked first. Good luck and keep on rendering.

hey there caryn - already commented here and wish to add that its a great image! - love the POV and water settings - dont change them - add a few more surfaces and render it out at 1280 * 960!!!!!