thefixer and AntoniaTiger...the lights that came with this cyclorama set as well as some global lighting in my cyclorama props library didn't seem to make any difference in lightening the image...I appreciate your tatking the time to offer possible solutions! Crescent...yes I am using P5 so I tried your solution and BINGO, it lightened up perfectly! thankyou SO much for helping :D one more small obstacle to overcome however and I'm good to go...take a look at the image I rendered and you can see the shadows from the brush are so square and boxy, and kinda dark too...any ideas how I can manipulate these shadows to be the proper shape of the brush and maybe a tiny bit lighter? thanks in advance!!

Say what you mean and mean what you say.