Opinions on background?

[n00bie]

Suggestions for improvement, etc...

[BerserkerTails]

Mmmm, me likes. It's got a nice style and feel to it... There's just a few small crits I have...

Number one (THE MOST IMPORTANT), is that the light doesn't look good. As easy as using the lighting feature in Photoshop is, it looks A KAZILLION times better when the light is drawn yourself (IE: Draw shadows...).

Also, the scene may be a BIT too dark. I don't know how it would look filling up the whole screen, but alot of people have dark monitors, and they might not see the dropoff of the cliff on the left there (Which might mean instant death depending on how the game is coded)...

All in all though, a GREAT background so far!

[Inkoddi]

...the bottom of the lighthouse looks flat. You should bend the red stripes a bit to make it look round.
The door has no handle, and most important, MORE CONTRAST!!!

[earlwood]

I like it, But the lighting is kinda...

Well, I mean it shouldn't go to the roof and such.

[Ali]

You can use smooth gradients in your pictures, but you have to remember the shape of the objects you are lighting. The glow you added to your lamp was a flat circle which doesn't look right. If you mask off only the part of a wall you wnat to light, you can use a gradient from light to dark to shade it accurately. Be careful though, gradients only really work for flat, cylindrical or spherical objects. Irregular shapes you must manually shade or they will appear two-dimensional.

I've painted over certain parts of your image to show what I mean:



I haven't added shadows, but you can use a mask for that too.