Awesome...!!

Excellent lighting and setting :D Votes... votes... 5+++ Lee

I think you did a fabulous job on the lighting.

wow that looks great! luv the cat.your awesome!

Nice model and realization. I don't know how you wanted the lighting to work. Having the light come in from a window and having the shadow hit the floor next to the chair to fill the room a little bit might have been interesting.

Beautifully done!

I will give you advice.... you want to know what you can do to achieve greater greatness? Well, take a deep breath, here it comes... You can.... are you reading?... good, keep reading..... you can.... awe shit, I forgot what I was going to say - lol... no, not actually, what came to mind as far as advice, post more.... Your art looks top notch.... maybe put the cat's head in a guiateen next time - lol

Well I would have to say you are off to a great start. Reminds me of Barry Lyndon movie scenes. Not a Carrara user, but in Vue I would use volumetric lighting and turn on picking up a bit of dust in the air...just a little light rays....the air is just too clean..otherwise this is terrific image..5 from me. Oh...I would also leave out the line work in the corners.

Very beautiful and realistic.

Splendid work and fantastic lighting.....!!!!!

A really great looking image, excellent artwork.

The one thing that could be adjusted is the left hand position, which doesn't fit in with the grace and beauty of the woman. (Only since you asked specifically, and I so admire you for that.) The rest is perfect, and the lighting is just amazing.

For some reason I just love this sort of scenes, its a very fine render. One thing that bugs me a bit though is the "burnt out" areas on the back of the chair and the wall in the background. From what I remember those are typical problem for this type of lighting in carrara and hard to fix. One way to hide/fix the problem is to add a little bloom effect in postwork. Another is to render one darker version of the scene and blend the two different lighting together.

Nice work. Populus touched on the issue. The background becomes more important than the woman because it is brighter. The trick to fix that is to use Carrara's ability for 'negative' lighting. For example, adding a spotlight pointed at the alcove that instead of adding light, subtracts it. Doing so will leave the brightest whites on your subject.

Wow stuff Sassy,one of your best.

I think she looks beautiful. The first thing I thought of was Kiera Knightly in "The Duchess"...The hair is sensational and you've done and wonderful job with the dress....the colours are gorgeous. Love it!!!!

I think it's fine as it is.

This is such a wonderful work of art, really one of your best Sassy. Just love that lighting

Beautiful work, I love the many details and the awesome realism here! Linwhite above is right, when you have so much realism going on in an image, you've gotta get the posing right on. A good trick: Find a similar pose in Google or Yahoo images and use it as a photo reference. If you do this enough, I've found even your non-referenced poses start looking better. The negative lighting idea sounds intriguing, although I haven't personally used it. One Carrara trick I have used: Use a weak spot on the opposite side of the main light, using a relatively dark color. It sometimes just adds that something to an image and cures the burnout. This technique can also be used to heighten drama: Red/orange can look like subtle bounce from firelight, blues can make the primary light appear warmer than it really is etc. In reality, you probably don't really need to change much of anything as this image is head and shoulders above much of what appears here (including much of my own LOL)! But you made the mistake of asking... LOL! FWIW

Wow, superb lighting work!

Lovely rich textures in this scene!

Superb scene! Excellent work! Very interesting lighting. Almost forgot : even the cat looks great!

The following is opinion only. Honestly, this is excellent. The lighting is very good, and I suspect the high exposure is deliberate. Excellent detailing. The problem is, it's so good that it brings attention to the poses. The first thing that sticks out to me, oddly, is the static feeling of the cat, and it just looks isolated. Her pose looks awkward and unbalanced. That dress should really be supporting her bolt upright. If you put the fan in her left hand and raised the right hand to rest on the chair-back it should pull everything back into balance, and I would be dying to get the cat interacting with her more. I can visualise a whole sequence of images from this involving cat, fan and chair. Thanks for showing this, Inspiring.

This really is a beautiful render. Love the detail and lighting on this. You did a wonderful job!

Brilliant!