How do you light up full character?
A combination of standard lights, and an HDRi dome, followed by tonemapping tuning, bloom and gamma adjustments. Luckily, you can have the majority of that premade for you, in easy to use cingle click options. Cake and Bob HDRi sets all come with dome rotation, brightness levels, shadow levels, vignete settings, and bloom. Bloom also comes at most of the newer DM scene bundles. Also Dimention Theory's "Rainy city Chicago" also comes with brightness tuning and white balance (a.k.a. tonemapping) options. You don't need to use their HDRis for bloom, tonemapping and brightness options to work, so... they're perfect tools.
And, then, once the long process of rendering finishes, photoshop. If I give you the raw versus edited render to compare, they're so drastically different, in terms of contrast, color balance, shadow bias, gamma and color leak and tonemapping.