And xuu3, BB already advised to change the GC in the VSS prop via Material Room in the 'Template Skin'. Also reduce the shine to 0.4 and the SS to 0.3 as in the image.

@hborre

Quote - The effect you are seeing is perfectly normal, that is how Gc should work.  You lights are still too bright in your second render with Gc, if you are looking to duplicate the image on the top.  Is there any material Gc present and did your render exactly the same as above, Gc off at render and Gc on for materials?

The scene contains no material gc.
The differenc between the post is only the Lights used.
In the first one BB's Full Body Lights was used. In the second on the pp2010 light set
Studio_RembrandtAO was used.
The rendersettings are saved in the .pzz and was not modified, except settig GC ON (2.2)
and OFF  for the two different render results.

@mackis3D
thank you for your advice  i will use it when i use vss again.
But the images i posted here are not based on VSS. There is no VSS Prop in the scene
(not yet)
I was using BBs Lights and the other LightSet just to show my problem.

Conclusions:
(Pls feel free to correct me, when something is wrong)
"My" lights are to bright, if i reduce them i well get result like the above pics.
(still  scepticism) but i will try hardly.

Hmm, so PP2010 offers us a Firefly render egine with linear rendering
plus the nice feature of Scene Wide GC (with easy turning on and off) to get
correct rendered images,
but they dont offer us light sets , considering the usage of the GC feature .

if i use one of pp2010's light sets and turn GC On with 2.2, i have to adjust the lights.
funny
is wish there would at last one setting, that considers GC ON.

Another common compensation is found in shaders. For example, many have screwy settings to produce what looks like a decent skin, but when GC is turned on, they produce ugliness. A typical one is that specular highlights are made broader than they should be, because they appear to fade out too quickly. But with GC, they don't, and end up producing exactly what we see in your GC render. The highlights smear out and they make everything look washed out.

So in addition to turning lights down, you have to stop using messed up shaders.

And it isn't as though setting up a couple lights for a portrait is hard. Here are two spotlights. On the left it is white at 75% intensity. On the right it is white at 30% intensity. I rendered with GC and IDL. This looks great to me.

Added a third spotlight from behind and it is colored a light red, 30% intensity.

I made the main light a slight yellow, and the side light blue.

Andy's shader here is just a Blinn node. He looks metallic. This doesn't looked washed out at all. That's because it has simple shaders that don't try to compensate.

This is still rendered without GC, but I added a 4th light - a white IBL at 40%. I also increased my main light to 100%, and increased the blue and red from 30% to 60%.

It looks pretty good. But I got here by compensating for the unnatural darkness produced by monitor gamma. I had to futz with all my lights and add another one. And if I had funky shaders, they would probably be going nuts about now.

@BB
oh yeah, da Teacher has spoken.
Great thanks. rebuilt your andy scene and got good results wit GC 2.2 and IDL
The only thing i couldnt get right was the metallic look of andy with the blinn node .
(post of that simple shader conifg would help, dont laugh about the shadernoob =me)

This comes due to lack of my shader knowledge.
But its not that easy. i think i can read and understand english well.
i can express myself in english so that everbody (maybe with a little smile)
knows what i mean. But when it goes to shaders , it gets more tecnical and complicated for me. Did you ever try to translate expressions like "ambient" "specular", "diffuse"  "AO" ... to german. hah, you need to get a feeling for this translated words.
Didnt find yet  good german tut's that explains basic shaders.

think too, it was a good idea to throw my old GC knowldege away and start from scratch.
I said in one of my former postings, that pp2010 docu about gc is thin. Thats not  right,
the manual explains well, what happens with GC in pp2010. (well it doesnt explain GC in dephts, but that is not the task of the manual.)
funny , now when things getting to work for me, i remember  "the red ball" with Simon and the artisctic lens, "Your lights are to bright". (was my startig point of GC)

@hborre,
following your suggestions with ligths, id did  get good results.
thank you very much

Very much thanks goes to Acadia for her linkthread, which made it possible for me to improve
the apperance of the hair.

This image holds also my first "shader accident". connected to refraction instead reflection (in the stockings) gives a nice effect that i like. well the value is still to high.

think i am using this (empty) "Andy scene" as a reference for upcomig projects
"what you see is what you get for GC On"

Now i can fix the rest of the materials, then i can proceed to my planned Dr. Parnassus series.
Like BB said: "you have to stop using messed up shaders".
Mostly i use materials out of a collection from Tabala , Mapps and ajax that was built under
P5 / P6. Will try to fix them if it appears to me that they need a fix.

That looks terrific! Well done. You're on your way to being a Poser expert.

I'll be back in a bit to show you the "cheap metal" shader. It's only one node.

I agree with BB, a much better improvement.  Once you get to understand how shader nodes influence your final outcome, you will be scrutinizing your content a little close and correcting those faulty connections which shouldn't be there in the first place.

I said it would be only one node, and it is, but I added another node to control color. In metals, the specular color is the same as the diffuse color (generally). For a gray metal, we make the color white, but make the diffuse reflectivity very low. It is .02 here. I will show you others.

Anyway, this is Andy with that material. Lights are 75% white spot, 30% light blue spot, and plain white (no image) IBL at 10%, IBL Contrast = 1. I use IBL for quick test renders.

Use of nodes like Granite is always good to increase realism. The utter perfection of perfect specularity is always disturbing. I always add little variations to a shader. Look closely at the stairs and you'll see they are not perfectly smooth.

This time I turned off the IBL and rendered with IDL.

So is it safe to say it's worth the extra $120 to cross grade to Pro 2010 rather than 8 from 6? The GC alone looks like it might add years back to my life spent compensating for underexposed lights.

As already mentioned with Poser 2010 it has 64 bit program and render support, background render, supports a slightly better range of import/export stability with files, better alpha-masking, better texture filtering.  In addition the Pro versions of Poser generally feature a slightly up-modded render engine, with richer and better lighting and faster ray tracing.  Another great feature is the Queue Manager, only available with Poser Pro - and it's not just for networks, despite what you may have heard; With the Queue Manager you can batch render multiple jobs in sequence, or render off animations while continuing to work in Poser (background render is limited to a single frame from a single job).  Also, to my knowledge, Poser 2010 Pro also features more content.

I haven't really had a chance to fully test it, I hate the Poser 8 style interface and library also used by 2010(it's hit or miss from my understanding, you either love it or hate it), so I am still doing a lot of work in Poser Pro 7.

This is all great info about gamma correction, though from the title of the thread I was hoping for more practical details from those who have done the upgrade about whether Poser Pro 2010 is worth the $200-$250 over Poser 8.

Re: GC... BB mentioned screwy shaders in commercial skin materials. That may be so, but what can we do about it if we want to use GC with such characters? Have you seen the sheer number of nodes some vendors use to make a skin shader? I am nowhere close to knowledgeable enough to fiddle with all those nodes to remove the over-correction built into them. Better to just delete them altogether? Which ones? 

See the dilemma? I think this is why a lot of people just throw their hands up and turn off GC. They use as their lighting baseline what makes the skin look good, everything else follows that criteria.  Because turning off GC is one controll vs. minutely adjusting 10-15 nodes in the skin shader. 

I'm guessing vendors are making skin look good for the lowest common denominator, which right now would be users of P7 and earlier. So vendors fiddle the skin shader nodes from here to Tuesday to make skin look OK in standard P6-P7 lighting with no IDL or GC. Leaves those who want to use solutions like GC in a bit of a pickle.