Just thought I'd throw this out there. :P

Not sure what you mean by 'too much' lighting...

If a scene is obviously set outdoors (and I'm assuming a planet with a basic minimum of one sun, here) and there are eight different light sources, that would be too much lighting.    Also, though, a professional portrait photographer, in my admittedly very limited experience (people don't ask to take my photo all that often), makes do with a lot fewer lights than some Poser lighting sets that I have seen.  

It is possible to kill the "realistic" effect by having too many light sources.

Some of my most 'realistic' results have been obtained via the agency of Photoshop.....not in raw renders.  I know that some purists don't think that's the proper way to do things -- but hey: it works for me.  If it gets the results that I want, then it's all good.  Frankly, I'd rather spend 5 minutes in Photoshop than 5 hours tweaking things in 3D, trying to get just the right light setup.

Then again: programs like Vue & various highend apps can crank out beautiful renders without a lot of the near-endless tweaking that certain other ahem programs seem to require......

But hey: it's not a problem, anyway.  Running the dirty render laundry through Photoshop is a wonderful & a quick cure for all rendering ills.  Your colors can come out brighter & your whites whiter.  But to each their own........if something else works for others, then that's all good, too.

Too many lights can give a subject a washed out look and kill a lot of the small details. When I use poser I don't use anymore than 4 lights in a scene even when doing an outdoor render I have a max of 4 lights using HDRI lighting. Of course lately as a new Vue 6 Infinite user I do most of my outdoor renders using Vue. The Vue lighting system is much better than poser lighting for outside images. However, I have found poser to be much better for indoor renders than Vue. Vue can do indoor renders but it's very slow compared to poser and take a lot more tweaking than poser.

IMHO post working is key to a great image and at one time here on the forums was a hot topic.

You don't have to use post work to get good lighting.

Check out this image by Olivier. He only used Poser and a gel light.

http://www.runtimedna.com/mod/forum/photos/Message187432.jpg

www.runtimedna.com/mod/forum/photos/Message187433.jpg

And I've been having fun trying out Nerd's volumetric lighting tutorial in the tutorial area here.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/tutorial/index.php?tutorial_id=57

"God only uses one light" But he doesn't half bounce it around a lot...

It's possible to overdue things, but sometimes people are simply trying to make up for the rederer not being that great with reflected or bounced light.

well, anyway, just to agree with the others, having a lite set with dozens of
infinite lites is not gonna make up for FFRender's difficulties with indirect lighting.
it can do it, but only via python script, it's unsupported, and it's inadvisable due
to the extreme slowness of FFRender with indirect lighting variables activated.