The lighting is essentially divided into two types of light use. One type is ambient room lighting, and the other is accent lighting to focus on special objects or areas.

The ambient room lighting is created by 12 spherical lights arranged all around the room. Most were placed high and set at Squared Falloff, 75 intensity, and left white in color. Three of the low lights were set at 40 intensity for gentle fill. Image #1 (use your Back button to return to the tutorial) shows how the lights were placed as seen from a top view. Image #2 shows the lights as seen from a side view. By using 12 lights, I got very soft shadows, nice variations of intensity resembling radiosity effects, and a very realistic look to the scene. 

Probably the single biggest reason most 3D artists don't get the realism they seek is because they use only one or two lights. Granted the render time always gets longer with more lights, but the quality of the finished image is well worth it.

To better show you the difference between the sphere room lights and the accent lights, I switched off all the room lights and rendered the same scene with only the accent lights on (Image #3).

The Accent Lights

Accent lights were also used on the sitar on the bench. I purposely wanted to see the fret bars on the neck of the instrument, so I set two accent lights to the left of the sitar to light down the neck. By lighting from this angle, I got a strong highlight on the left side of each fret and a nice shadow on the right side of each. Looking at Image #6and Image #7, you can see how the lights on (#6) makes the details of the neck more interesting than (#7) when the lights are off. Image #8 shows a wireframe view so you can see where the lights are as compared to the sitar object.

The boat model also looked better with some accent lighting on it. In this case, parallel lights were used to allow the greatest control of where the light goes (only on the boat and nowhere else). These lights made the parts of the boat brighter so they more easily stood out compared to the background. Image #9 shows the boat with the lights on, and Image #10 shows it with the lights off. Image #11 shows a wireframe top view of the position of the lights compared to the boat. The light behind the boat is set at Level Falloff and an intensity of 25. The light in front is set lower, at 12, so the slender rims of backlight are brighter.