I really have a personal hate against standard ambience settings, LOL, I really can't understand why they come so varied and confusing, so: I usually set the ambience to the same exact value for every object in the picture (if you shiftclick on the ambience color it will bring you up a color-picker and you can enter the RGB values manually), thus avoiding shadows of different colors. You will discover that not many presets are affected by this, they only look better. Your second example shows, more or less, that I'm right :) Ehm :) S.