Lighting on Darker Backgrounds

[topsecretagent]

Could anyone advise me on how to avoid harsh white (sometimes gray) edges on my model whenever I try to use a darker solid color background? I'm having a difficult time creating clean, realistic lighting with colored or dark backgrounds.
Unfortunately, I don't have Keyshot Pro, so the HDRI editing options are not available to me...

[DMerz III]

Your model is being backlit - looks like you have some pins/light area in your HDRI environment. In Keyshot, even if you set the 'background' as a dark color, it doesn't actually put anything there to 'block' the environment dome. So there's a few options here, you can drop in an actual piece of geometry such as a background sweep/ramp and set it to something like diffuse shader and whatever color you want or you can turn those lights off in your hdri editor that are hitting behind your model.

Hope that helps! Best of luck

[topsecretagent]

A ha! I brought in a background ramp, colored it and that did the trick!! It also helps that I have since upgraded to Pro version and now I can add pin lights (and I've got a whole lot of learning to do with these new features)

Thanks so much for that helpful response

[DMerz III]

absolutely! Best of luck with your secret agent work