Gamma Correction or not?

marble

Hi,

I'm having an ongoing struggle with lighting and skin using 3Delight. After years of using Luxrender (Reality) I returned to 3Delight after I found Reality 4 gave me problems. I have read (and taken part in) other threads that discuss gamma correction and the general advice seems to be to turn on Gamma Correction at 2.2.

In some circumstances that did improve things, depending on the lighting and the particular skin I was using. However, in other scenes I found I was having to turn down the lights to almost off and then do a lot of postwork to correct the "washed-out" quality of the renders. Specularity was hard to judge and I couldn't work out whether to reduce SSS strength or not.

I've tried GC at 1.7 instead of 2.2 and that seems to improve matters somewhat but not for all surfaces and all lighting sets. I am using the AoA Advanced lights but before I purchased those a couple of days ago, I was using the Uber lights that come with DAZ Studio.

Sometimes I'm tempted to leave it at DS defaults and put up with the over-saturated, high-contrast renders that result. But I would like some advice that doesn't involve the need for a masters degree in physics to understand,.