I am a beginner with Bryce and Poser, depending on the genre of picture I make the picture dark to enhance the mood of the picture. My LCD TV is set to flat and my video card is set to flat as well so I can see the color perpective in the picture as it really is. I find in my experience the I get the best render results with the monitor flat and using the premium render settings in bryce. I ask that people give me a chance as I am learning. I appreciate critical and non-critical comments about my pictures. I admire the work of those people who are very good at what they do artistically. It gives me inspiration to keep at it and keep learning. Thanks, datadraw1.

It will come in time. It takes a while to get the lighting right and for each scene the light will react differently because the settings aren't the same. I had a look at your gallery and a couple of images that you uploaded recently do seem a tad dark to my eyes. Don't let peoples comments put you off, just enjoy what you are doing. 

I agree...As well the darkness is a matter of personal style in the images I saw that 'seemed' a bit dark...subject tends to also be a bit dark in those images as well so I'd say take the too dark comments with a pinch of sea salt....

I could be wrong but I think the color, lighting, etc may vary on different monitors. My monitor seems to give everything a gray cast & my Grandson complains all the time about it being darker then his.

Attached Link: calibrating a monitor

I had the same problem when I started out. Turned out my monitor was set way too dark. Correcting it made everything from Bryce to gaming easier.

Attached Link: click here

I was thinking along the same lines as scanmead.  Years ago there was a grey scale chart in the tutorials here that you could use for setting brightness and contrast.  It seems to  be gone now.  Once I started getting more involve in photography I bought a monitor calibration device. 

The attached link is a simple brightness/contrast calibration scale.

http://displaycalibration.com/brightness_contrast.html

I calibrate using this but I don't think this is a calibration issue. If ones monitor is too dark, one would over compensate for the highs and the final image could be viewed as being too bright with no dark tones while an image that is created on a monitor that is too bright might be seemingly too dark because the creator over compensated for the lows.

This is more about tonal range and lighting [like orbital suggests]. Of the images I would define as having very little tonal range [or dynamic range] they are the ones that are 'too dark'. It's not so much that they are 'too dark’ - more to the point - it's that they have no tonal range or key lights. They are seemingly stuck between the white point and black point making them very flat [erring closer to the black end]

Not long ago I bought a 22 inch...I HAD to put the brightness down on it because whenever I was working on there for any amount of time, I felt like I was staring into a fluoro bulb.  Talk about Headache City.