Attached is a version of a garden patio at dusk with some colour toning done in photoshop.
There are a few fireflies still present particularly on the lower right,but I can live with them.

The trees are Xfrog trees and the ivy is made from the free Ivy generator application.

Looks nice, is that a hdri map or Thea sky ?

Hi davidh1,

Very nice image! I love the overall mood and feel. I do have a constructive crit if that's ok? The stone walls would look much more realistic with some displacement -- it's evident on the corners that it's a flat surface, as well as across the light reflection on the wall on the left hand side of the stairs. But that's a minor thing, the overall composition and modelling are really good!

Thanks for the comments,
The sky is HDRI and the stone wall has displacement,just vastly reduced.When I rendered with a stronger displacement,even with DOF,it stood out too much.
Sometimes real is too real and dosen't necessarily produce the image I'm looking for.Its all about focusing on one part.
The main element in this image is the seating with the HDRI reflected from the metal,married with the rough stone/paving.

Since this image was uploaded I have changed the balcony from a straight forward timber to a more detailed wrought metal ,and also added low sunlight to the scene and will upload soon.

Very Nice image, congrats...

Attached is the sunlight version,same HDRI but a low angle sun added.

I like the lighting in this revision better than the first, very well done!

Since you mentioned getting fireflies I was wondering if the rest of your image was done and you let it continue longer just to try and eliminate the fireflies? The reason I ask, is that I got fireflies in an image the other day for the first time and they just didn't seem to go away. I let the image cook long after all of the other areas were done. After 15 minutes all areas except where the fireflies were in the image were "final ready" and done. I let the image cook until it reached 40 minutes and then gave up trying to get rid of them. I was wondering if you experienced the same with this image?

Yes,pretty much so,but the more I use Thea the more I think the issue lies with the resolution of the HDRI.I could be wrong but images where I don't use HDRI , fireflies dont seem to exist.

I know that certain HDRI's can be blurred slightly to try and even out the light source which can help reduce these anomalies. I'll try a few more tests and see what happens.

I have heard that about HDRI's before as well. The image that I was working on didn't have any HDRI however, it was all area lights. Very weird too, I've used every material in that file before in other projects, I'm not sure what was going on. I ended up switching over to BSD and got a great image with no fireflies in 4 minutes!

i have had experience of fire flys as well on occaisions with hdr, and a solution that worked sometimes was to use tr2, and they never even started to appear
were as tr1 they would appear from the very beggining ??