So everything I've written above is nonsense and shoud be deleted. I spent all weekend reading, especially Bill's posts at RDNA.

So I would love to be able to do Gamma Correction in Poser but didn't go for the special on Poser Pro and am now kicking myself. But along with that would have to come a 64 bit system, new motherboard, video card, etc. You see how that goes...

I do know want a blender is. It's just hard for me to wrap my brain around it outside of Photoshop. If I have to deal with more than one element, I get confused. And I'm totally math challenged. So when I look at shaders and how they work together and the values, it just becomes a big muddle.

But I finally loaded up an IBl, Spec, and Key light and got what I've never been able to get before. A one pass render with acceptable AO. At least to my eye. And I got what I wanted. A soft portrait with no postwork. That's not to say it doesn't need it. But I've never gotten anything this close to a render that didn't have to have major correction.

I tried about 500 different renders with minor changes everything. Amazing how

I'm posting two separate renders. The first with a IBL from Catherina Harders from her first light package . The IBL has just a simple dark sphere with a light silouette of city shapes. All grayscale. Nothing more. I added the specular and key lights and then added a pale pink color to the key. Just to see what would happen and I like the result.

The second is Olivier's graphics from his IBL tutorial. I did this also in grayscale with the same spec and key. The pink color on the key was toned way down and I have a hard time getting hte brightness of the image to work. I had to fuss much more with this but the result is probably more real. Don't know...

Two lights showing in the eyes because the spec and key were close to each other. I couldn't figure out how to get the shadow that I wanted without doing that. I also have some strange striations showing and don't know if it's the mesh or something else going on. It's very evident on her cheek. This is a figure I've worked with so much that I can't imagine that it's the mesh and I didn't notice it. Sigh...

This is the same figure in the former renders with a different texture. I'm hoping it's just a tired machine that could use a rest and defragging.

Neither of these renders has any gamma correction or postwork of any kind. No, I did add the color background.

Bill, your advice has been invaluable. If I've absorbed a fraction of what you've given out, not only here but in all the posts I've read, I consider myself lucky.