In my experience, if something looks WAY off, it's probably not render settings, as those tend to affect smaller details or leave tell-tale artifacts, such as shadow blotches or the appearance of underlying meshes, and so on.

It's probably not the lights, either. Lights are very very important to the look of a final render, but they usually aren't so bad that they cause confusion. In any case, they are easy to test. Turn them off one by one, or adjust the intensity one by one. And then run some test renders. By the time you're down to 3 or fewer at half the intensity they started at, you're on the right track. (Make sure at least one light is casting shadows.)

The best strategy for lighting is to set up your lights with a very simple scene that renders really fast so you can do lots of tests (I think this is the best way to learn as well), and then when you have something you like, build the rest of the scene.

Vilters' advice for outdoor scenes is very good. It's hard to go wrong with it.

Anyway, in my experience, when something really weird is happening, it's more than likely to be something in the material room.

If you're using a more recent version of Poser that has gamma correction, a lot of old content will look bad or strange because the old stuff uses hacks to imitate the effect of GC. If you combine the hacks with the real thing, you get a doubled effect or worse. This is why a lot of vendors suggest turning GC off, because that's easier than updating all their old products. :)

But since GC actually makes renders look superb (and will help you to accurately reproduce the colors that you're creating in other applications), it's best to learn how to cope with it.

It's usually not the actual textures (the color maps) that are the problem, but the shaders that people tack onto them.

If you show screenshots of the advanced tab in the material room of the items that are giving you the most trouble, someone here who is more of an expert on the material room will most likely be able to tell you exactly how to fix those problems.

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PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.