Just want to add another comment.

While I appreciate artistry and one should always take control of any situation and physics be damned...

The reality is that when you look at a light source, its apparent brightness is thousands of times brighter than the diffuse reflections it creates on other objects.

Consider two narrow beams of light among the many going out from a small bulb.

One goes straight into your eye. Let us declare that the apparent perceived brightness of that is X. It doesn't matter what exactly that is in lumens or whatever - let's just call it X.

Now consider another beam of light of the same power goes in a different direction and strikes your outstretched hand. That beam then bounces IN EVERY DIRECTION from your hand. That is how pure Lambertian diffuse reflection works - the light splits off and goes to every point on a hemisphere around the point of contact, roughly equally. Only a tiny fraction of that reflected light goes into your eye. The rest goes all over the room.

That light from your hand is typically X / 1000 in brightness - it's VASTLY darker than the beam that went directly from the bulb to your retina.

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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)