I agree with elenorcoli - Poser 5 using the Firefly renderer gives pretty good renders. I do all of my renders in P5. I would like to use P6 but it's just too damn slow on my poor old 'puter :) With that being said however, I could never get the lighting effects in my renders direct from Poser but I rely heavily on Photoshop for adding those effects in postwork.

The secret is to render your image a bit dark in Poser and then use the Curves, Brightness & Contrast and the Hue & Saturation tools to get a more favorable overall tone for your image. Then add the shadows and light areas with the burn and dodge tools respectively to enhance the highlights.

One of the advantages with MAX lighting is that you can specify which objects get lit by each light and more importantly - which objects don't get lit. This gives you much finer control over the lighting of your scenes and this would have been a nice enhancement to Poser lighting. I suggested it as a product enhancement but it has not implemented yet and there is no reason to believe that it will be added to Poser 7 - too bad.