This is my first time using yafray, so be gentle 
Seriously though this is the first time I’ve gotten anything decent with yafray. I’m still unfamiliar with yafray, so the point is C&Cs please
Pretty kool 
…turn down the spec a bit tho
But the spec is fine! IMHO of course. What are you gonna do with this next?
Maybe GI it?
The M’s are pretty big, I suggest making them smaller.
Them ‘M’ looks about off center too
Is there only 1 m per candy? I thought there were two… runs off to buy a bag of mms
Update: You’re right.
Also compare to this photo I found googling…
There is a definite shine on the candy, where you can see the overhead lighting as rectangles. Plus the “M”'s are not that crisp… faded grey more likely.
And, umm the only other thing… I’ve never seen a purple m&m before…
Nice shapes though. Might I ask, why using yafray to render something that appears to not need the specialties of raytracing? I’d think you could get the same image with less hassle in the internal rendering engine.
you need lots and lots more of sweet delicious creamy gooey chocolate m&m’s
starts drooling
I’ve never used Yafray, so I don’t know if it’s the issue, but I see two things that bother me.
1: The shadows are very dark. It seems you need a back light or skylight to put a little colour in there. Something as small (and round) as as an M&M would cast a very light shadow.
2: The shadow edges aren’t anti-aliased, you can see line segments running around them.
I know raytracing gives hard edges but again, for something this small, hard edges look peculiar. Look at the Google link above and see how pale and soft the shadows are there, even though there are so many M&Ms piled together. Maybe GI would deal with these problems.
I guess this was just a test run but I don’t see anything there that requires a raytrace render. You could get softer edges with buffered shadows and a scanline render.
Good composition and colour balance though.
robby, those looked like peanut m&ms, something a bit different from the m&m’s he’s making, but nice find neways. If u really wanted to add some detail, u could always texture them to looked faded (not perfect) like the real 1’s
I like them, but IMHO the hardness should be set up a little (look at real m&ms for estimate ratings). Anyways, I think you should set up a gaint pile of multicolored chocolaty goodness.
Nice work
XrQLz 
some adjustments;
I turned the hardness up a smidge, moved the back light down. I still have no clue how to lighten a shadow in blender (which has been agravating me to no end for some time).
I also made the ‘m’ smaller and faded it a bit. Unfortunately all the 'm’s have the same fade pattern.
Still using yafray
The only thing that makes shadows lighter, in Blender and in real life, is more light from different angles. In the real world light bounces off the sky, the ground, walls, trees - everything. In Blender, AO or GI attempt to simulate this but the easy cheat is just to add more lamps, usually set with no shadow.
Of course, this will brighten lit areas too so you need to adjust all your lamps so the main areas are still properly lit. As a guide, you can have a secondary lamp set to a mid blue or blue-purple colour and make it a hemi directly above your scene or at a slight angle opposite to the main lamp. To prevent this blue lamp giving a blue cast to eveything, you make your main lamp a bit yellowish or slightly orange. The hemi “skylight” should be set for no shadow and no specular.
You can even throw a lamp under everything (not sure how this works in raytraced pics), set it to a warm mid tone (an ochre colour) with very low energy and this will simulate light being bounced back up on the underside of your objects. Give it a shorter distance setting and lower energy. This should give you pleasant bluish shadows. Again, no shadow, no spec.