Do you have the latest patch? Sr2beta3? Mine did that with the first 2 beta patches but it works better now. also you can click on the texture variations in the face room and try to lighten it up in there. Here is a pic I just did real quick to show you. I loaded a front face picture in the face room, applied shape then did like Sue suggested opened a texture I had made from the face photo in the face room and this is what it looks like. Note I have the latest patch installed. No post work this is directly from poser.

Poser 9 SR3  and 8 sr3
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Processor Type:  AMD Phenom II 830 Quad-Core
2.80GHz, 4000MHz System Bus, 2MB L2 Cache + 6MB Shared L3 Cache
Hard Drive Size:  1TB
Processor - Clock Speed:  2.8 GHz
Operating System:  Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit 
Graphics Type:  ATI Radeon HD 4200
•ATI Radeon HD 4200 integrated graphics 
System Ram:  8GB