Attached Link: Some image I found with a single spotlight

I understand if you don't want to go to the trouble of changing all your shaders to be GC shaders.

However, I am now fully aware of and convinced of the absolute need for GC. I don't care if you do it in shaders or in post work, but you cannot achieve realism without it, because what you're seeing is not what you generated. What we see on computer monitors is SEVERELY darkened and the darkening happens most to our midtones. Thus we raise our light levels to bring the midtones to appear to be nicely lit, and this throws the highlights into the stratosphere.

This is why Poser renders look like Poser renders, unless they have wacky compensating shaders such as face_off's or mine. The yellow bloom on so many renders is entirely because the artist was unhappy with the overly-dark midtones, and boomed the lights real hot to compensate.

I should probably draw some pictures of what the math is behind all this.

By the way, if you use any other things in the scene to "judge" where the light is and how strong it is, you're just doing more of the same.

Of what use is it to judge the light strength from a prop or atmosphere shader that is not doing gamma correction?

You do realize, for example, that if you start with just enough light on, say, a one-sided square, to get it to render ALMOST white, and then you cut the light intensity exactly in half, what you see on your PC screen is not 50% darker, but 79% darker, right? I hope this is clear. I"m not making this up. How about 33% intensity? Do you realize what that looks like on your monitor? It is 91% darker - i.e. only 9% as bright as the original, instead of 33% as bright.

For years, we've been discussing how difficult it is to light a scene well in Poser. Guess what - Poser lighting had nothing to do with it. It's that Poser never did the gamma correction at the end, like all the other renderers are pre-configured to do.

I knew of gamma correction for years, but I did not understand the incredible impact it has. I thought it was a "final tweaking for artistic reasons" kind of thing. It's not.

When you throw a single spotlight on a figure, even one with a pretty strong falloff cone, it still lights the figure very well. But looking at that on a computer monitor makes you think it falls off really fast. It doesn't.

Two years ago I posted a long time (because I was a noob) about how Poser did something wrong with lighting - how when I turn a polygon 45 degrees away from a light, it got MUCH darker than it should. I was basing this on comparing the render to my experiments with actual pieces of cardboard. Then I fiddled with the Clay node because it let me make that seem like it was less dark.

In reality, the excessive darkness was entirely because I'm looking at it on a computer screen. As soon as you GC any Poser image, it looks right.

Remember, though, that almost every Poser image has been overexposed, in order to try to shift the low and mid tones into visibility. The result is that the highlights have clipped and gone completely past what the screen can display. That's when you see the yellow bloom.

Related to this is the excessive high settings we use on IBL, to perform fill lighting and ambience. I've typically used intensities of 35% to 60%. In reality, that is a SHITLOAD of ambient light. When I render with GC, IBL of 5% to 20% is typically enough to make the ambience of a sunny day indoors!

Have a look at the linked photo I found. I can clearly see the girl's blouse all the way down to where the falloff cone is way darker than the center of the spotlight. By the way, did you know all digital cameras do gamma correction? Nobody would buy one that didn't, because the photos would seem too dark on a computer.

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