You are lightyears beyond me :] I'll have to look up some tutorials to explain what you said, but thank you! The reference photo is extremely lifelike and amazing. Much appreciated!I did a render in this environment a while back, I used ghost lights on the windows as well as setting my hdri intensity set to 2. I created mesh lights out of the default spotlights and set them to rectangle with a size of 50x50. if you use mesh lights the shadows wont be as sharp and it wont look like shes being lit up by a flashlight. The main problem with this render is that there is no natural light or at least not enough.
Here's my render for reference
View attachment 802179
Not Bad, but that hair needs some work. looks Grainy. Did you let the render finish?