Hi,
I have been working with this free-provided model from cgtalk.com for “fruit” light challenge. I decided to take this challenge and improve my lighting skill.
Materials (shaders… all proceducals) and lightings by me. Rendered with blender internal renderer.
Please let me know what you think of it 
Damn shame you didn’t do that before the release of the thread’s author’s book, it surely would had been included 
Top notch stuff!
I like the mood in the image. Feels kindof classic middle eastern in some way.
Nice study of lighting. Can you specify a bit about how you placed your lights
and briefly go over a few of the settings?
//Mathias
Its a nice challenge to get quality lighting with the internal renderer, you have done good too,
I have a few crits that you could improve upon:
I think it can be improved a little, although you have done decently well.
cheers
The overall lighting is simply “too dark.”
You need to start by illuminating the scene, such that a histogram of the image is mostly-centered. You want details in the shadows without blowing-out the whites. Believe it or not, the much-maligned “ambient light” is (imho) quite good for this.
Remember that your lights don’t have to be white, and probably should not be. The overall-lights set the basic feel or mood of the scene.
Once you’ve gotten that down, you start injecting highlights, which might be very small spots. Some of the things you want to consider in this step are: - Defining the edges of objects, such as with rim-lights. - Defining the character of a surface. - Providing complementary light-colors to balance the color of the object itself, and to avoid “color bleed” (important for printing), or “color jump” illusions that can happen when, say, blue and red are adjacent to one another. - Varying the saturation and hue of the colors in the scene.
If you want to achieve “mood,” such as particular shadows, always remember that what your eye really sees is contrast. Look at a “black” spot on your monitor, then turn the monitor off: soon you see that the screen really is, and always has been, “simply grey.” That opaque-black that you see isn’t really there, except that it is adjacent to a much brighter spot and it has a sharp brightness-transition vis a vis that area, so it appears “black.”
All of the colors in this scene, except maybe the banana, are richly saturated. So are all of the lights used to illuminate it. Experiment in these areas…
Note: If this is the mood you were shooting for … sort of an “old masters” look … then feel free to completely ignore all of the foregoing! 
sundialsvc4 and garphik: I was going for high contrast and that might be not a realistic approach of doing it, but I wanted to make fruits look as tasty as possible without being distracted to the background or the plate or anything for that matter. And how come the grapes don’t look as realistic? Anyways sundialsvc4, for your information, I never used a white light at all. I used a lot of color illusions.
toontje and The M.h.p.e.: Thank you! I am glad you like it and yes I agree it’s kinda classic in a way.
I’ll share my setup later. I am busy here at the moment.
I like it very much, the lignting reminds me of paintings by “Georges de la Tour”. My only crit is about the grapes, which could use something to suggest their transluscency. They look too opaque and uniform IMHO
Transluscency is on and I had to fake SS by texturing painting the “light” in them… kinda harder than I thought…
Any suggestions/ideas?
Very nice good job keep it up.
defenitly the colors and shaders are superb sweeeeeeeet!!
great work!
Suggestions ? erm, well…
I suppose you could try to decrease the reflexivity of your grapevine, and decrease the saturation of its color too. If you take a look at white grapevine you’ll notice it is not so green, and not so reflexive unless it has been meticulously polished before 
example 1
example 2
No more ideas, and I’m not sure I’m beeing relevant, this is just an opinion, not sure it’ll fit in the overall atmosphere of your scene.
