I posted this but wound up cropping out some of the image because of the strange light in his hand. Not sure why its there because his hand is in the shadows. I tried to tone it down in post work but was really not successful because I don't know what I'm doing. Any suggestions about why its there and how to avoid it?

I've seen this happen with IDL renders when smoothing is turned on. Is this the case with your render? If so, try turning smoothing off.

What's the material setup for the figure?  Is it one of the older, self illuminated textures?  If so, it's going to give you those sorts of weird effects.

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Sam is absolutely right. Did you run EZSkin2 against the texture?

If your IDL Intensity is set too high, this can contribute to this type of glow artifact too.

Use the Dimension 3D advanced render settings script to reduce the IDL intensity. I tend to go with max IDL intensity of 0.5 these days. Sometimes lower, e.g. As low as 0.15. even.

That was following advice from Bagginsbill regarding Poser's diffuse levels being way to high, proportionally... and so, the way to counter this, when using IDL, is to lower the IDL intensity.

Out of interest, is that a Point light that is casting the shadow on the figure?

I did not give enough information here, I apologize for that. I am using Poser 7, the light on the face is a spot light. I don't actually know if the skin texture is self illuminating. Its P3Designs Joey. I rendered with raytracing and shadows. I tried it without raytracing but it still gave me the handful of light.

There is a simple test fthat you can do: Turn off all lights in your scene, then do a render at low settings (no raytracing, no IDL, high shading rate, etc). If it does not come out pitch black, there are self-illuminating materials.

 

Check that nothing is conncted to the ambient node.

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Thanks for the replies. I checked - nothing is hooked to the ambient node. When I deleted the lights and rendered, no tale tale glow anywhere. I changed to a different light set, no glowing hand but I couldn't get the shadows to fall across his body so maybe its safe to assume this is caused by moving the lights around trying to create a little shadow drama?

oops that's 'tell tale' - can't spell tonight

Looking at the image, it seems to me that the ring and pinky fingers are spread apart much more so than the other fingers.  It seems that you are seeing the light shining off the sides of those two fingers, because of the angle of the light.
You could use the side to side movement dial and tighten the fingers to close up that gap and that might stop that "glow" from showing. :)

Jan

Thank you for the reply, Dreamer - I did try that, it wasnt very successful - the light still showed and it seemed to draw attention to the fingers being at a little bit of an odd angle. It might be more noticeable to me though since I've been fiddling with this for so long trying to fix the issue.

Well, if you like the lighting (and it is very nice!) and don't want to change it, and bending the fingers doesn't get rid of the glow, then I guess the best fix for those glowing fingers would be some post work. :) 
I've run into similar problems before, fought with lights to no avail and finally gave up and fixed them in post work. :D

Jan

Could you show a screencap of the light settings?

I think its the face light that is the culprit - here are the screen shots

and...

Just for grins and giggles, turn the shadows to "Ray Trace"...

I think I tried this before, I tried so many things I'm not entirely sure!

Turn Shadow min bias down to 0.1 and rerender.  Although raytracing will give you more realistic lighting, there is nothing in the scene that really requires it except eye reflections.  

I did that just now, it didn't change the handful of light but it made the shadows falling across his body more dramatic which I like a lot. Thanks!