Hi Greyface, I think this looks really good.

You did a great job with the steps and platforms, however it's a bit harshly lit. I recommend you take a soft fuzzy brush and use the BLUR tool on the gently blur the south side of the black forming the platform and each step. This will help the feature to look realistic. Make sure to keep the northern edge sharp just like you have it.

For the water, I know exactly how you are feeling because I am crap at doing water. I recommend you make a strong edge around the water, by using the following technique: make a new layer over your water layer and call this layer 'pool shadow' or something like. On your pool layer, press alpha to selection (or colour select if you used a layer mask) to select only the area of the pool, then go back to your pool shadow layer - keep this selection throughout. Get a fat black fuzzy brush and draw around the edges quite thickly. Then use the BLUR tool with a HUGE fuzzy brush size to smudge everything, then go around the outside again with a big black blush and then blur it again. Important to do everything by hand to avoid a machine-made look. All your black drawing and smudging should still be restricted to the blue pool area. It should look pretty good now, but if not you can run a gaussian blur and reduce the opacity or duplicate the layer, so that it looks good.

I recently made a similar underground map with pools of liquid and platforms and steps here where you can see the two things I am talking about being used: http://www.cartographersguild.com/fi...tml#post201410.