I am proud to say the image itself only took like 1-2 hours to make meanwhile the manta whose contours and anatomy is barely visible, took more than 15 hours to make 
Wasted time but a somewhat nice result i’d say.
1 Like
I’d say the composition isn’t really the greatest. You want the viewer to be immediately drawn to the central object of the scene, but it took a bit of time for me to even realize what the picture was. In very dark scenes this can be really challenging, especially when the central point isn’t emitting light (I recently did a night render and I really messed up the composition), but luckily your main object is emitting light.
Even so it blends in with the rest of the scene and it isn’t very visible. I suggest :
-Blur the background lights. Currently there is nothing separating them from the main one and it’s distracting.
-Make the central object brighter. You can do this in a couple of different ways, you could make it’s back glow more, or maybe add some artificial light and render it in a different layer.
-Tone down the contrast perhaps. You should play around with this and see what works best.
As you said yourself it took you a lot of time to make the main object yet it’s lost in the image, since the background is drawing way too much attention. I hope this somewhat helped you, as I find it hard to give any other feedback on this image since it’s very hard to read. The main thing I’m trying to say here is that all the work you put in this image isn’t really showing because of poor lighting and I think you can make a lot better render with just a few simple fixes. Hope I didn’t come across as overly negative (I tend to respond to every post like it’s in focused critique :D).