The first two weeks i hadnt any problems with poser pro, only recently, the last few days it seems to act up like this. i create a test scene in poser pro (windows vista) toss in v4 with a regular skin using no shaders, apply some hair, add a ibl light source, AO (it doesnt really matter which kind of lighting i use. poser pro has shown the same behaviour with the standard factory default lightsources) it looks allright in opengl preview, but when i hit render, all colors are like washed out, the skin of v4 looks like a necrophiliacs wet dream, all pale, like a corpse, and the transmapped hair looked really bugged, like its way to transparent between the hair strands. so i have saved this test file and opened it in poser7 (vista), same render settings,hit render and it looks the way i expected it to look like in the first place, everything allright. ive reopened poser pro, loaded the file again just to get the same washed out colors,until i resaved this file in poser 7 and reopened it in poser pro, which fixed it somehow.  so, my question is, "what tha heck?"

how can i fix this? ive heard there is a gamma setting in poser pro, but how could i have changed this value without knowing where to find it? i dont think its caused by the gamma thing.

both poser versions share the same runtimes, and i havent done any changes on the preferences , just installed poser pro again yesterday, so its basically fresh out of the box, and i still have this weird problem...i think the picture on top explains it a bit better.....

so ive added a m3 base with some hair and a skin, hit render in poser projust to get the infamous "application stopped working" error, in this case firefly 64 ...so..  there was this neat little trick to add those programs which get always closed by vista to this execution prevention list, which is only working for 32 bit applications like poserpro itself.. 
it for poserpro exe, but FFapp puzzles me with this annoying error.
i have 8 gigs or ram, so i should be able to render more than that without crashing <_<
discuss

To change the gamma, go into your render settings and look at the lower right hand corner.  You will find 2 tick boxes, one for HDRI output, the other below it for gamma correction.

Poser Pro enables gamma correction by default.

Unfortunately, this will change a lot of things. They should not have enabled it by default. Many Poser materials are not set up for it.

Your transmap is being gamma corrected. This is not desirable, as the transparency information is a bunch of numbers, not a real "image" in the sense that you want to look at it. But Poser Pro doesn't know the difference between a data image and a visual image.

As a result, all the numbers are changed.

As hborre says, turn off gamma correction if you don't know how to deal with it, or don't want to.

However, it would be good to learn "Pro" techniques, since you have Poser Pro. Gamma correction (when used properly) makes a huge difference.

The right thing to do is to turn your lights lower, first of all, because everybody who ever used Poser before gamma correction had them too hot.

Second, you need to configure each transmap to use Gamma = 1.0 on it because it is not something that should be gamma corrected.

oh, this was quite informative, thank you. but another problem still keeps me from using poser pro on a regular daily basis, and thats the "poser pro.exe stopped to work" error.  strange thing is that it is working like twice a week for a whole day of shutting down,reopening, loading stuff...  regular workflow, and then there are those days where poser just keeps crashing after starting it, it keeps working until i highlight a bodypart, or library item, then the aplication window turns intantly grey, followed by the error message "stopped working".   ive already added the poser pro exe to the file execution prevention thing window which helped me with most programs which had this error in windows vista, but poser pro just keeps crashing, even after several reboots.

is there a way to get rid of this thing which makes vista close applications randomly when they have smaller loading time hickups like poser? 

and why does my poser pro work fine today, and maybe tomorrow not anymore for the rest of the week just because vista says so? lol ^^ 

thanks anyway for the helpful reply

Can't help with the application mis-behavior. I run Poser 7 and Pro on Vista and XP no problems.

Make sure you right click your .exe poser icon in Vista  and select "run as administrator", otherwise all kinds of weird things and crashes/closes happen.

oh , wow, im going to try this. Is there a way to add a launch parameter to the poser shortcut to launch it as admin by default?

Seems like after you launch it as admin a few times, it sticks, but I'm sure there's a better way to configure it...just haven't had the chance to set that up yet on my computer...