I’m trying to recreate this image, though not trying to make it as realistic, but I wanna get it to look nice…
I think my biggest problem here is the lighting… Any thoughts?
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Well.
In order to make it look better in my opinion there are a few things that come to mind. Firstly the main poster on the basketball court. It isn’t transparent like on the original image. So it looks like there are 2 basketball courts on 1 basketball court se get red of the background in that texture.
Also the trees are a big issue as well. They don’t look real and that doesn’t matter for you but for starters you could add some size difference and in the top right it looks awfully repetitive.
the ground material you are using is also not that good. I suggest taking a free one from textures.com it will make it look much better. Same as the court. You should fix up the tanbark in the playground as well.
The fifth last thing I need to mention is that the trees are clipping through a wall which is not in the original image. I think you should get rid of that well. Also add some more props to the scene to make it more real. Such as those barrels. I cant seem to see any benches (maybe its the lighting) so add some of those and in a visible spot if so.
Also you should change the angle of the camera to the side so that its facing the same direction as the original image. If you do that you will have to add a background and you could achieve that with a skybox hdri but ill mention later on. Also there are no lines on the court. You could find a transparent image and put it on top of the pre-mentioned court texture or you could just take a full basketball court texture from textures.com I’m sure they have one!
Lastly, yes . The lighting is way too dark and it looks like there are volumetrics being used? Get rid of them if so and add a skybox for the world. Suggest ably a park one or just a plain sky skybox but that will give your scene better lighting but based on the camera angle in the original image a city skybox or suburban one would be preferable.
These are some skyboxes i found which might be useful for this:
If its too dark make sure to keep increasing the world strength for the skybox. But other then that Its good! I’m sure there are other changes that you should do but I cant see them yet.
Have a nice day.
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Wow! That is a LOT! Thank you… 
I’ll try out your suggestions…
As he said 
I’ll also add that it seems that your trees are all rotated the same way (at least the ones on the right), and so, creates a pattern that instantly tell it’s CGI
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Uh… Okay… Thank you… I’ll fix that too
I would try taking this photo into fSpy ( https://fspy.io/ ) to calculate the camera lens and the perspective.
From there you could model the scene more accurately. You could even camera project the image onto your mesh and bake it into a texture map. Lots of videos on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sdvP4MQb3A
https://youtu.be/dHXRrpG_oSk
The main thing that stands out to me is the basketball court texture. Where is that coming from? I don’t see any dark spots in the original. The lighting is the other big issue. I agree with Object. Use a nice HDRI that’s close to the original.
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Thank you. I just recently downloaded fspy but haven’t installed it yet. I’ll work on it and make it better.
how did your project go? I would love to see the end result!
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Only just logging back in. School resumed so I had to take a break from 3D. I haven’t returned to that project unfortunately… 
… Since I’ve learnt a little more now, I’ll try to go back and do more, then I’ll definitely tell you how it goes, if you’re still interested…
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Sounds cool! I am very interested to see what you make and see how it goes.