Nice background trick I wonder where yo go it from 
Just like HP said your preveous one was better.
I did add more contrast… 
Um, no. The new shading has way less contrast.
ok… i went to irfanview and opened my pic and went to enhance colors. then i putthe contrast up. so hows is that not higher contrast if i put the contrast up???
Looks like you only put the brightness up to me.
…
Can’t you just manually change the few colors to add more contrast, though?
Do you know what contrast is?
Contrast is a difference between colors, basically, I think usually meaning the difference in brightness. It’s the same in spriting as in English. The problem is, computers are dumb, and they don’t know how to do things like that, so instead of making a difference, what you’ve got is no difference at all. The computer, as far as I understand, regards contrast as saturation, because in a few instances, that does work. All it does is take every pixel and add a certain amount of saturation. Because of that, it’s practically one solid color. If you made one side of your sword purple, and the other yellow, THAT would be contrast.
In this case, what they’re asking is for one side of the sword to be darker, and the other lighter.
What you did was increase black-white contrast, meaning light colors get lighter and darks get darker. What you wanted to do was simply make the individual shades more different.
You have to do that by hand.
Like this?
Something more along these lines.
(But definitely not exactly. This looks terrible, but the contrast is pretty good.)
Is this better? It looks better to me 
.
Wow my sword went from this 
to this
to and finaly to
Here is a SWEET monster wallpaper I found at unique graphics forums.
Its been quite a while since i’ve updated this so here it is
Koreeshy, the sword of Corruption.
the sword looks very original, but it looks very baloony to me.
Actually, the last two you’ve done have looked really… round. (Those are the only two I’ve looked at, it very well could be all of them.
It’s in the shading… you have steady shading all the way across the sword, which would work if it was round. But in the middle it should change a little more heavily from where the slope inverts. (something like this: ^ But with something closer to a 25 degree slope or something.)
Except your last one is a little differant, I guess… it looks more like /------, so on the front slope, it would be very very bright (like it is), and on the flat part, it should be a grey somewhere between medium and light, with a little darker in the back, and on the back slope, much darker. Not black, just darker.
Baloony?
Wtf did you just say? something about ^ and 25 degree slope.
What does that mean?
Ok can you edit the sword and tell me what you mean because I am so confused right now.
looks worse…
…but I think he wanted you to make the sword like that. Or something like that.
It makes the sword look flat, and not baloony. <— Not my words.
EDIT:
Or maybe it was somwthing like this?
but now the sword looks like its lazily done and retardidly looking. I think I’ll stick with my version.
Hey, are you calling my edited sword a retard? 
precisely