I was rendering a scene with lights and everything seemed a little washed out, so I started turning off the lights to see who the culprit was.  Eventually, I had all the lights off and the scene was still lit.  The image below is with no lights at all in the scene, but it's still too washed out for my tastes.  Where is the light coming from?  I made sure there's no background light .  Any ideas?

BTW -- it's a Superfly render and here are the settings.

Is that a background image being applied to the scene or a skydome with an active ambient channel?  There won't be anything in the render settings that control ambient illumination.

There's no background image or a skydome.  That's part of the building they're standing in.

I loaded the crime lab and deleted the all lights. Using the render settings you posted, I rendered and got mostly black. I would double-check for lights that you might have missed. Looking at the shadows it looks like it's to the left of the scene. Otherwise, I would check any materials you might have changed to see if something isn't giving off light.

In the render settings, set Mesh Light Samples to zero and render again;  perhaps the building has ceiling light panels which have ambient (or translucent) cranked up.  If there are no lights "on", then in preview, you could use a camera to scan the ceiling for bright areas.

I think I figured it out.  There's a lot of glass in this scene and I replaced the default texture with one designed for Superfly.  After looking at all the nodes, I noted it had a very high emission node.  After playing with that (turning it way down,) the lighting went back to normal.

Thanks for all who made suggestions.

if it's not a light, then it should not have any emission at all. End of story.

Um, I'd like to get my 'super ambient' luminaires' that bright. There seems a low surface brightness limit for non-light 'lights'...

Tangential, my PPro_11 does something similar from time to time when I flip between lights' modes. Gets stuck on 'washed out'. Then, without obvious correlation, goes back to 'plays nice'...

My suspicion is the hapless trash collector needs more caffeine...