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Bumping this after reading the more recent OSL topic...

 Guildsman wrote:
Space marine helmet lenses look fine with a little glow. It shouldn't look like there's a spotlight shoved up in there.

Personally, I think light sources that cast even 'a little glow' on surrounding surfaces - assuming daylight conditions, at least - need to be fairly intense. In my opinion, the problem with a lot of OSL effects is that they aren't: The lesser, reflected light is just the same intensity and colour as the light source, which IMO would only happen in a highly mirrored surface (and even then it might be muted a little) In some of the examples Murrdox posted, for instance, it really does look like someone just sprayed too much paint on, overshooting the edges of the blue or red part. In eyes and eye lenses it often looks like an amount of eye shadow that'd shock a glam rocker. (In the bottom tau pic, aside from colour it doesn't look too much different to the orange effect. Which confuses me a bit. Is the orange OSL too? Or rust? Or camo?)

In those cases the effect needs to follow the example of the pics Yonan posted in the last page: Emphasise the light source by pulling the glow way back, or make the deepest or most central part of the effect bright white.
And that's the problem with the middle tau pic. I assume there's supposed to be some kind of Tron-like glowing line effect going on there; but the brightest whites are outside the recessed lines, and the recesses are almost the darkest part of the effect!

Overall, I think it needs just a modicum of understanding of how light and colour work, that an average gamer wants to replicate but can't be bothered learning. The kind that asks for exact hold-your-hand recipes to paint very simple colours or patterns, and who thinks technical paints are a great idea and the ultimate shortcut to painting effects - "Just use official GW a-bit-of-sand-in-normal-paintTM! Just slap some fluorescent turquoise paint on it!" (There's another painting fad I hope dies out quick[er]: the need to bung eye-weltering verdigris on every metallic surface that isn't bright silver)

Here's something that might be somewhat relevant. That's a very good blog for learning about light and colour effects, and how they apply to general painting, from one of America's most respected artist-illustrators. Take a shufty through the tags and archive.