Thank you very much for your time and effort poiting these things out to me, everything in your edit made absolute sense. Both the trash can and street light turned out great, it looks better and has tons of more depth to it now and it's really nice not having to use the automated gradiant tool. Besides the fact that the result using that turned out crappy it also felt like the objects didn't really match the style of the rest of the image before the edit.
It's amazing how just a few pixels (in many cases just one) can change the overall result in such a dramatic way.
Anyway, I spent some time with the image after I studied your edit and made some updates to it. It clearly looks better in my eyes but I obviously have more to learn.
UPDATES:- Changed colors on the lines (almost all of them I think, and sure enough it's much smoother now.)
- Made a brand new street light!
- Re-pixeled the trash can. (*)
- Added shadows (I know that it might not be 100% correct angles etc. Same goes for highlights.)
- Tried to enhance the "REA"-sign and the "7"-sign using grey pixels to smoothen out the text.)
- Pixeled and added some wooden boxes behind the store/building.
- Begun to experiment with see-through windows, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out but something still feels odd...)If you or anyone else have more creative feedback I would definately not ignore it, although I have to admit that studying your edits made me realize that I really need to experiment ALOT more in PS myself before posting too many questions
* Also, I understand the basics of how you created the recycle icon but I didn't really got the hang of it while trying for myself (therefor I left it out on the update), I will experiment more with this since it's kinda crucial knowledge for my city/block/street-project but if you have any hints on how to get into the right kind of thinking for doing this that would be awesome. I tried to use the same dithering effect on symbols I had already put in there, like the "7"- and "REA"-signs and I think the difference is pretty noticable, although perhaps not optimized.