The suggestions for fixing the plane's ambient and diffuse helped a lot.
I figured out what the problem was -
The problem was that I'm too lazy to manually tweak 4 or 5 10-part color
maps
to get the colors to stop being washed out =)
Even the shortcuts are time consuming.
I tried the same deal with a box instead of a sphere and the results were
much better.
Thanks to all who replied.
