Thanks for the feedback! You're right! maybe some environmental lighting hitting her from behind. Granted this was made in character creation and not studio which would make that easier obviously. Just putting a light node behind her for example or the maps light. If I could achieve something like that however using the graphics mod and have it appear natural then that might just be the tweak I need to really get it to pop off. Thanks again for the feed back! (Anyone that might read this, I'm having a problem to where the character disappears when I use a background in character creation. What I think is happening and I think the best way to explain it is: If everything is a layer, then the background layer loads over the character layer making her disappear. I don't know if that's what's happening but it's the only thing that I can think of. If anyone might know a fix, I'd appreciate it! Thanks!)I can't say much on the background problem, but one thing I noticed is you might need more light coming from behind the camera. I know you said it looks darker with your 1080p monitor, which might explain why it looks darker on my monitor as well since I run a PC with a 1080p monitor as well, however, it still looks like there might be a lighting issue coming from behind the camera.
Considering the graphics from the base games without mods, Honey Select 2. Honey Select 1 is great for the treasure trove of mods that have come out for it, something only time can help Honey Select 2 with, but Honey Select 2 uses the same level of graphics as AI Shoujo, which is one of the best photo realistic style Illusion games out today graphically.
As for space issues, you could just get an external hard drive and store this one there, it will run just fine over USB. There may also be portable repacks of Honey Select 1 out there as well, which could also be moved to an external drive. This was my solution to the issue so that I could store every Illusion game I have plus any installation files.