And I don't know if you've read this, but I can almost guarantee that any "light set" you buy was loaded with extra fill lights and extra intensity just to compensate for the unnatural way that light seems to fall off with incidence angle when rendered without GC.

Any light set you you buy or pick up from the old way of doing things is going to have this characteristic. You have to look over the setup and find those lights that are effectively helping with gamma correcting - lights that boost the shadows, lights that fill from the side, especially lights that have shadows turned off. These should usually be reduced or deleted.

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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)