So I went ahead and went back to the old color scheme, it does look better.  As for the render, I played with the AO settings in both world settings and post process.  I used the light function feature as well.  And I went ahead and added 4 directional lights through the scene and pointed them in 4 directions, rotated them on both X and Y.  Now that I had fun with lighting, I'm gonna finish modeling and baking.  

Here's a screen grab

This screen grab is to show the dirty lens effect on the camera, by using the dirt mask in the post process properties under bloom.