Keep going. bevans84 was right in that I didn't say to increase the emitter lighting (such as the EnvSphere), since what I was most trying to address was the surface-to-surface bounced light that was resulting in light amplification in crevices. I'm trying to tone that down since it is clearly wrong.

I did mention two ways to tone it down.

1. Decrease Diffuse_Value everywhere. This would cause all diffuse reflection (direct light-based, direct emitter based, and indirect bounced) to be drastically reduced. The direct and emitter based lighting would then need to be increased to compensate, leaving us with reduced indirect bounced.

2. Decrease IDL Intensity. This would leave direct light-based reflection as is, but reduce direct emitter based diffuse (EnvSphere), and indirect bounced shading (skin to skin).

I actually don't know which is better, but there is a certainty that both of these options are going to reduce the contribution from the emitter lighting (EnvSphere or any other glowing props). Since that isn't the goal, per se, then it stands to reason that one would have to increase the emitter lighting - which is precisely what monkeycloud just explained.

There have been two (subjective?) complaints of late, coming from zanzo, mostly.

1. Environment color (such as sky) is making too much tone change on skin.

2. Crevices glow.

Both of these are addressed by using technique #2 - reduce IDL intensity.

Since I don't know the actual ratios of real life, I cannot dispute nor concur with "zanzo's complaints" (trademark). However, given that you want to reduce those things, reducing IDL intensity will help.

Whether you then want to tweak up the overall lighting (environment value, sun-light value, spot-light value, etc.) is neither called for nor a cause for objection.

I'm very interested in the results you guys are posting. When I have time, I plan to calibrate my camera to neutral settings, and then go outside and measure reflectance on some common objects in shade and in sun, and I'll then be able to tell you what ratio I actually discover. This will tell us something about the contribution we should configure from the EnvSphere, versus the infinite (sun) light. These are, I suspect, the major factors in outdoor lighting accuracy - sun and sky. But that's not the story indoors.

Indoors, I have found that direct light is around 8 times brighter than indirect (bounced) light, and so I am fairly certain that diffuse reflectivity (aka diffuse value) is closer to the neighborhood of 1/8 than 7/8. [I conducted a really shameful test of this. Basically I configure my camera for total manual mode, no change in exposure from one shot to the next. I point it right at a light bulb and also at a piece of paper lit by that light bulb. The ratio in brightness (after remembering to anti-gamma correct the numbers from my photos) was around 8x.]

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)