So the shadow are not color property unless your talking about very low light wavelenth from an object; subsurface scatter or converted lights. GWeb, are you saying that shadows have no color at all? Or that the color we see in shadows isn't really shadows, but something else? I guess I'm confused. When you see color in shadow, what does it matter in the artistic sense whether it comes from indirect light or direct light, or hot or cold? It LOOKS the same to your eyes, regardless of where it comes from or what causes it. To reproduce what you see in art, you paint with the colors you see, or you use textures that reflect what you see, or you use material calculations to reflect what you see. If I load a picture in to Photoshop, and I use the eyedropper to lift a color from a shadow, I get a formula of the amount of red, green, and blue that are in that shadow. If there is no color in the shadow as you say, the red green and blue values would be equal (0,0,0 or 112, 112, 112, or whatever). But, I doubt you will see those equal values (ie: shades of gray) in the shadows in a photograph. ANY variation from those equal numbers means that there IS color in the shadows. To achieve that look in Poser, to get things away from the dark "coal paint render" that you are complaining about, you change the ambient colors of the materials. It is not a function of the renderer as you seem to think.