Thanks for the tips here. I agree with you on the outdoor scenes. The HRDI works much faster if you don't try and do the procedural stuff. I was able to get rid of the wash out look though.....I just had to solve the problem! :) It was a combination of the material brightness and the .hdr files I was using. Some of those half-size ones work better. On the issue of shadows: No....I'm not just talking about HRDI. The shadow edit doesn't seem to work in any atmospheric setting. If you look at posts 4-7 above, you'll see the setting I'm trying to adjust and what's happening. It has to be something simple I'm missing....or it's just a bug. In Vue 4, you can reduce the intensity of the shadow for the sun and any other light by using this edit function, just like you can in Poser.