Nevare and cobaltdream are right, you need both good lighting and good shaders for your Poser scene to 'pop".  But I also would put lighting just a tick above the shaders. I often say that lighting can make or break a Poser picture. Cobaltdream is right in saying that you can use someone else's knowledge, which means lighting and skin textures either in freestuff (there are some excellent ones there), or for sale in the Marketplace. I have found that I have a particular fondness for Rebelmommy's texture sets for V4, I purchased two more of her sets last night from DAZ because they're on sale right now. Her attached shaders are very nice, but I also use the python driven shader system from face_off, found here in the Marketplace. Just look up "Realism Kit" or face_off, and you'll find it. It's a good investment. The VSS system can also give nice render results and it's free. It was created by the math guru bagginsbill and you can find a big discussion thread on it here in the forums. Both systems can be used with any texture you apply to the millineum people by DAZ. VSS will also work with figures inside of Poser such as Judy or Jessy or James (I'm not to sure if the Realism kit will work with those figures). There are a few free IBL lights in the freestuff area, I've used most of them and studied their settings. There was a time way back in the Poser past (1999), when people could freely distribute pz3 files in the freestuff and that's how I learned so much because you could literally pick apart an entire scene. You could look at hw the lights were set up, you could see and write down the camera settings, ect. You can't really load up full pz3 files to free stuff any more, so that avenue for learning is pretty much gone. But there is far more 'how to' discussions in the forums now. When I'm satisfied with my lights, I'm going to offer them in the Marketplace and since shareCG is around I'll put up a freebee (I no longer have a website, but it was built for me and I'm web challeneged anyway). Bagginsbill also has a free system for creating IBL light probes from your own photographs or panoramic photos from the net. I suggest you look into that too. I also highly suggest you go to the Node Cult forum at RuntimeDNA. There are lots of threads on shaders of all kinds where people have put up screenshots of their node setups so that you can manually copy them. I've got a big folder on my hard drive of those screen shots and I refer to all the time for shader effects. The Poser app now had a large learning curve for those starting out with say Poser6 or Poser7. It's not a huge learning curve and there are short cuts like using people's freestuff or purchasing from the Marketplace. I started out with Poser3 which was given to me without a manual and in the beginning I just clicked on things to see what they did and asked a lot of questions. If you want to learn it, you can end up with some very nice renders, but (and this said with a grin), it takes practice and something bordering on obsession.

"A lonely climber walks a tightrope to where dreams are born and never die!" - Billy Thorpe, song: Edge of Madness, album: East of Eden's Gate

Weapons of choice:

Poser Pro 2012, SR2, Paintshop Pro 8