I was so about to post some stuff. Then I sent the photo-manip to a friend to get some feedback. I saw it on their monitor and realized that it looked like crap.

Apparently my monitor smashes blacks. I played with my contrast and gamma settings, and I couldn't fix it. (a side effect of using a 5 year old computer I suppose)

if you're not familiar with the term basically levels near black all become black. Which means that on my monitor everything looks fine, on yours however some of what I see as black will be grey, or a dark color.

With photography, or digital painting this would be less of a problem as all the colors would originate from the same source, but doing composite work of 3 or 4 photos it sucks. (basically one or two of the photos never went to black, where as the other two did. making the ones that did not stick out like a sore freaking thumb and completely defeating the point of compositing them in the first place.)

soooo... yeah. Anyways I've started checking devArt again regularly, and hopefully soon I'll be able to afford a new computer (soon as in within a month or two I hope) and then there will be all sorts of madness to be done. (I also plan on getting a tablet at that point in time.)