hey Mayastatic,

nice start there, and like you said the shadows look nice..

It looks like the photons are picking up to much colour info from the texture and because all the materials are of a simialr colour it looks very saturated.

I pressume your using mental ray.... what you need to do is go to the mental ray tab in the material attributes and press 'derive from maya' (at least i think its called that, havent got maya in front of me right now!) then lower the diffuse...
Should help at least

looking good though, keep it up

pat