Thats odd PJF. I have tried 4 different formats all of them seem ok with this setup, perhaps its a demo thing. This is how it was done. You put your subject, the camera and a point light into the sphere. At this point I turned off the atmosphere and the sun. Set the point light to squared falloff make it pretty bright but don't put it too close to the subject. Add a picture texture to the sphere in both the diffuse and ambient channels. Set both channels to 100% Turn on True ambience your small preview window will be pretty dark but the image will render fine with True ambience on. To make the image more photographic used depth of field and choose pretty realistic looking textures. You must enable premium settings to get true ambience to work. I also used softshadows (which helps also). Playing with the diffuse and ambient setting with all textures is a must. In all the objects I used the same texture for both channels. The setting for the poser figure in the other thread was 84.7 diffuse 23.4 ambient. The setting for the skull 47% diffuse and 34% ambient. A setting of 16 in the rays per pixel gives you a good preview though a noisy render. a setting of 64 seems to give very good results without excessive slowness. Settings of 144 and 256 are pretty much identical with higher accuracy then 64 but slower rendering. In this picture only the background texture was changed all lighting and materials were left untouched. Griggs ps using True ambience in interior scenes works pretty sweet too. Griggs again