This render of yours is lit excellently! What is meant when Carrara artists say "Indirect Light", I've seen this specific term used in caps a few times now? Indirect Light is similar to 'radiosity' in a lot of other packages, the bouncing of light between different objects and surfaces. In Carrara 2 it is integrated in the advanced render, in C3 you can choose Sky Light and Indirect Light independently, that's why people started throwing those caps around. HDRI is new for version 3, you can choose an HDRI file as lighting source in the 'background' tab of the scene. Those are not Carrara specific. There are some free ones around the web, a fair group on the C3 CD and you can buy them on CD's and DVD's from Dosch Design and Sachform (to mention just two companies) I'm also a bit miffed by what extra channels you were refering to, and how they associate with "Extraction?" and Depth of Field "in post?" When you render an alpha channel along with just the color of your render, you get additional information. The alpha channels (found in the aptly named 'channels' tab) are not just black and white, but all greys from 0 to 256. The 'disappearing' feet are a demonstration of that. When you check the 'Distance' box, you get an alpha channel that you can use in Photoshop. When you option/command click it, and turn it into a selection, you can use that with several passes of low Blur amounts, to create depth of field. In post. Or to create color fall-off, by filling a layer with color and experiment with layer blend modes. Like I did to get some kind of 'heavenly' atmosphere. The same goes for the alpha mask. It is in the channels, and you need to make a selection from it and extract the figure from the layer (command 'J'). By adding a shader to the Head and Body, did you lose data from any 2D texture that may have been mapped to the figure, and if so which shader did you use, this is really a potentially awsome scene, the ambience of the skin is so bright it almost looks like he is glowing. I would very much like a copy of this scene, to use a few times over! I just wish the feet did'nt wash out at all. I'm hoping this is an intentional effect. The shader actually uses the 2D data from a HiRes Michael Texture Map I altered some years ago, for the pixel color. The other factors that make up the appearance of a shader (shininess, bump, reflection) are also part of the total shader tree. The bumpmap is also a jpg map, shiness is just a (low) value. I cannot share this scene, becaus Michael is a DAZ figure you need to have license to use, as is the original texture map. I will check your other thread too.