Pretty much what SamTherapy said.

The standard lighting I use to test all materials I make is a single white infinite light set to 100% intensity on the grounds that it's the simplest possible setup that works well. As I use Poser 11 with Superfly, which comes with free reflections on everything all the time, I use the Poser Ground with a simple material for indirect reflected light - White and Blackout materials are in the Construct folder in Poser 11 Materials. Changing one of those materials to a mid-grey colour will give a nice neutral test setup (for speed when test rendering I switch off Visible in Camera in the Ground Properties too).

I check exposure like a digital photo - render a low quality test, save it, then look at the Histogram in an image editor.

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