Hello! Okay I'm pretty familiar with Poser but this is just a lighting issue and I'm not sure where to start looking.

Moving from Firefly in Poser #9 to Superfly in Poser #11, obviously it was all about Area Lights, and Superfly is incredible, and that move was great. BUT moving from Superfly in #11 to Superfly in #13, it's all about using my Apple GPU ... and the speed is incredible. HOWEVER, even opening the same scene, with the same render engine, the lighting is all 'flat'.

See images below, same lighting, I've tried different settings for the area lights (like putting the Sun area light down to 70% and then up to 150,000% ... makes hardly any difference):

^ and I know I can use postrender to up the exposure/contrast etc, but it's not that. Even with Exposure up to maximum, it doesn't come close to improving the issue. I know I can improve the noise in all sorts of ways, but ignoring that, what should I do to begin sorting the lights out?!

Anyone have any bright ideas?

Get it? Bright ideas???? Pretty good right. Anyway yes, advice welcomed!

Well firstly, you need to increase the pixel samples on the render as 13 uses a different Superfly renderer version. That will help some.

Yes, show the render settings, please, it's likely the pixel samples.

Thank you for replying - I increased the pixel samples from 12 to 120 and that made no difference, I'm now trying 240 ... perhaps I should try thousands?

Your adaptive sampling threshold is too high. That limits the quality. The higher the number the faster the render. The lower the number, the better the quality. Basically, it's a "that's good enough" mode and the higher the number, the sooner it says good enough. It doesn't matter how high the pixel samples are.

Okay, now I've pushed the minimum pixel samples up to 20 as well as doing 240 basic samples, and though the noise is cleared, the lighting still looks dull/flat. Postrender does do a little to fix this, but the light still isn't 'glowing' like it is in the original Poser 11 render ... what could be the culprit? Could it be a setting on the Area Light itself?

It's not your min pixel samples. I have mine set to 0

Increase your clamp direct samples and Clamp indirect samples to 10

Here's what one of my images looks like with your settings, albeit lower samples for speed

And here it is with those set to 10

There are some settings on the left column you might want to increase also. Your max transparency will need to be increased for some images with detailed hair or other items with layers of transparency. You have no volume set.

That's it!!!! Thank you so much for this. Just when I read your post I upped my Clamped to 5 and it already looks like it's making a difference with a quick test. Thank you! 👍

you're welcome.

Another thing, specially when using non-lights to light something (AKA HDRI and/or objects with emmission), you might wanna have Diffuse Bounces at something like 4-8. That will allow the lights to bounce around objects and look more natural :)

You can leave the Clamped at 10 - AFAIK, it doesn't affect render speed. I'm told that 8 to 10 is correct to real world physics!