www.kraytracing.com

any advice on leaf texturing?

For leaves textures you should use UV maps...

After that, you should give to leaves a little transparent with incidence angle gradient (and use the same gradient on diffuse channel but in alfa mode)... You should also give to leave a little refraction (like 1.02 or some value around) and use a bit of refraction blurring (like 2 or 3%).

Another things: on leaves you should also use Kray Surface Option Shader, check "control FG rays" and put min 10 max 0. It mean that on leaves Kray will fire always 10 rays instead than amount you have set in FG Tab. It Helps a lot to speed up render time.

Hoping to have given a little Help

Best regards

Roberto

Very natural looking lighting, I like it

I don't recomend using transparency for leafs. Use translucency + specular + reflection. And you need goo UV map with normal map for bump...

Sky light looks good though! I miss some more reflection/specularity on materials...

thanks for all your remarks and advice..i really liking the physky and toneblending

the render without ps is very good.
i like it

It looks to me like the sky is just too dark/oversaturated - i.e. the blue is too intense. Don't you have the tonemapper for the background?