Ah, the thrill of enlightenment. Your next-to-last render is much better than your previous posts. However, you got it that way by forcing the use of a lot of light, i.e. a pretty low-contrast IBL.

The last render cries out for gamma correction. That's why it doesn't look right. The lighting is actually more realistic there, but the visual doesn't reveal that because it isn't encoded properly to display on a computer screen.

In Poser, if you don't do GC, you have to add a lot of lights to bring up the illuminations to compensate for the darkening you get from staring at a linear-color space render.

You said

Quote - The pink color on the key was toned way down and I have a hard time getting hte brightness of the image to work.

That is the classic phenomenon when you don't gamma correct. As soon as you decrease the light, darker areas drop off in brightness faster than the brighter areas. So you fiddle endlessly. If you have GC, then that doesn't happen, and cutting your light by 20% will decrease the perceived brightness by 20% everywhere. That's a predictable effect that you can work with. Without GC, cutting the light by 20% decreases the perceived brightness of bright areas by 25 to 40% and some other areas by as much as 90%. That's why you have to fiddle. You get these surprising non-linear changes in illumination.

I'm glad you're reading my posts, because the demonstrations and the answers are all there. But I'm a little mystified how you didn't see all the posts where I show you that you can have gamma correction in Poser without Poser PRO. You can do it in Poser 5, 6, and 7, as long as you use material-based GC.

Just as you now understand that there is light-based AO and material-based AO, so to you should understand that there is render-based GC (ala Pro) and material-based GC (ala Bagginsbill).

The most important thing is to GC your figure, particularly the skin. Other props we can get away with some error of illumination, because the human eye is not so sensitive to variations in tone and shading on a chair. But the human eye and brain are incredibly sensitive and intolerant of mistakes in tone and shading on human skin, especially on the face. We're programmed to detect very subtle changes, due to facial muscle movement. These reveal emotion, and if you can't detect the tiniest shift of muscles, you're not aware that you are about to be attacked, and so you die. :)

Now it turns out that I have provided the solution for the math challenged. It is called VSS. I'm surprised you haven't asked about it. VSS is a way to manage and change materials in synchronization. What that means, for example, is if you want to make the skin a little less red, you can adjust that in one place, click Synchronize, and every skin material zone on your figure will change to less red SIMULTANEOUSLY. This is a huge time saver for the tweak-happy. Second, VSS comes with GC shaders for human skin, eyes, teeth, gums, etc. With a single click it will replace all the naive shaders on your figure with really good ones, written by me (or others). In doing so, it will not replace your textures (color maps and bump maps). It uses them as-is on the figure. So you can load up a texture set (click) then apply VSS shaders on top of that (click) and render.

You will be amazed at the results.

Search the Poser Gallery using the word VSS as the key. Be sure to not limit your search to the last 45 days - go further back as well. You will find some merely adequate stuff, but you will also find some amazing nearly perfect realism. In almost every case, there is zero postwork.

Many of these artists are still posting VSS renders but no longer remember to say they used VSS, so I don't see them in my searches. I hope everybody who uses VSS can mention it so I can see them. I don't comment much but I love to see them.

Oh and to answer your older question, I gamma corrected your render by mounting it on a Poser one-sided square and then using nodes to manipulate the colors, I adjusted the overall perceived illumination and color saturation.

VSS is here.
http://poserbagginsbill.googlepages.com/vsshomepage

And for everything you ever wanted to know abut it, there is an enormous thread here:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2737823&page=4

In that thread are hundreds of renders demonstrating all sorts of effects and applications.

Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)

Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL

Subject: Help with some AO and weird other stuff...