Quote - Lighting and rendering are the most important factors, assuming your models have reasonably qualit MATs and shaders.

I'd back the advice to leave GC on and lower the light settings.

Choose either IDL or AO. You don't need both. IDL mimics real lighting better; AO has a distinctive look many people like. Your call.

Always favour raytracing with raytraced shadows over depth-mapped shadows. Use the shadow blur radius to soften the edges of shadows.

Use manual rendering settings, rather than the automatic slider. It's more efficient.

Pixel Samples: 3 for a preview, 5 for a final image without depth of field, 10 for a final image with DoF. This has a major effect on the 'crispness' of your images.

Min Shading Rate: Lower than 0.2 is overkill for most textures.

Raytrace bounces: 2 for simple reflections, higher for special cases (multiple mirror bounces, refracton etc).

Depending on your scene and its complexity you can lower pixel samples, turn displacement and smoothing on or off.

If your mdels are still looking pale (rather than blown out by overlighting), it's probably easier to postwork the colour levels.

Hey, thanks for the render settings suggestions!  I don't use Poser for rendering, but next time I need to do promo images for future products, I'll know the better settings.  Some things I know in fact (from using DS all the time, such as raytraced lights & raytrace bounces), but most of the things I was sorta blindly setting, doing the "hit and miss" till they looked good in my last promos.

...wolfie