Oh my goodness, I hope bagginsbill doesn't read this thread - he'll blow his top.

I struggled with IDL and GC at first, but reading loads of threads here and experimenting got me on the straight and narrow quite quickly. So let me throw in my thoughts:

First of all, if you find IDL and GC "too technical", nobody's forcing you to use them, but you are missing out on powerful new features which will expand your creative abilities. Also, using GC in Poser 8 is a giant pain. In PP2010 it's a cinch.

Secondly, before IDL and Gamma Correction (i.e. up to Poser 7) lighting, shaders and our scene setup workflows were designed to get around the fact that we didn't have IDL and GC (whether we knew it or not). We probably all have legacy content created this way, and it needs to be either scrapped or heavily adapted for use with IDL and GC.

If Silke is getting washed out results, it's quite probably the result of using legacy lighting, shaders and ways of thinking without adapting them for IDL and GC.

If you've been using face_off's Real Skin Shaders, or the ones he designed for DAZ, it's time to abandon them. Switch to BB's VSS: once you've negotiated the initial learning curve, you'll never use anything else.

Here are some key points to remember when using IDL and GC in PP2010:

The GC for images plugged into Diffuse should be left at 'Scene Gamma' (which is set in your render settings), and the diffuse value should be reduced from 1.0 to around 0.8. Almost everything else - maps plugged into transparency, bump, displacement and specular - should be set at GC 1.0. PP2010 has a wacro for doing this.

IDL needs something to bounce off, so use an environment sphere unless the scene is fully enclosed (i.e. has four walls, a floor and ceiling, all visible).

To simulate sunlight, start with 1 pure white indirect light at 100%, raytraced shadows at 100%, and take it from there: with IDL and GC, no additional lights are necessary (example).

Indoor lighting is more tricky, but you should use as few Spot and Point lights as necessary, make sure they all use Inverse Square falloff, and don't be afraid to use quite low intensities: I hardly ever use them at 100%, sometimes getting Point lights as low as 3%.

@RobynsVeil: I'm afraid your perception of GC is miles off.

sRGB isn't an alternative to GC, or something you can add to it. It's a standard which was designed to enable good-quality, consistent color rendition and reproduction on consumer-level imaging devices, based around the performance of a typical CRT display. The average Gamma embedded in the sRGB standard is around 2.2.

If you're referring to an sRGB color profile, this is something that characterises that standard and is used in colour managed systems to translate to and from sRGB. 3D Apps don't have colour management: it is assumed that incoming image maps meet the sRGB standard. When they produce renders, the image files are encoded to meet the sRGB standard.

GC in PoserPro is designed to reverse the sRGB Gamma encoding assumed to be present in image maps and  to make them linear, which means that applying Poser's linear shader nodes to them gives predictable results.

There's a quite lengthy article I did a few months ago here, if it helps.

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