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How about posting an image with the fireflies and a screenshot or descriptio of your lighting setup. It might help.
I included an attachement of the image. As to my lighting, I have 3 point lights one on the right/left and above and to the front of the model.
Moved to the New Users forum as this is set up for our Community Volunteers and others to take notice of those in need of help that are new to Daz and its programs.
Point lights are not meant for lighting scenes, they are generally used for candle flames or low wattage light bulbs. It looks to me like there is simply not enough light in your scene, and the render is not finished.
Try using a Spotlight instead of point lights. Iray is an unbiased render engine, and it mimics real light, but you have to give it something to work with.
You could look at this thread too:
Chris Palameno Iray thread
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/56788/iray-start-here#latest
I assumed from your post that you had the lighting much higher than in the render you posted from what you said about needing to decrease the lighting. I meant upload a copy of your render with your lighting at full strength. The render you posted definitely doesn't have enough light or, at least, not enough of the right type of lighting. I agree with JimmyC. Point lights weren't meant to be used as the type of lighting you are trying to use them. If you haven't bought a really good light set or HDR for lighting, try making a 3 spheres or planes and turning them into your lighting by setting their emision chanels then use these as your 3 point lights. You could also use spotlights, but I think the spheres give a softer lighting effect. You can adjust their intensity levels and colors individually to get type of light you want. You can also adjust the size of the spheres to help with lighting. The only issue, besides the lighting, that I see in the render that you attached, is in the hair. I don't really see a lot of what I typically call fireflies in this rendr. It does look not quite finished. I would suggest running it longer, too. There are lots of sites with free HDRs that you can also download for lighting. Even if you aren't using an HDR for the background, they are great for lighting. Just plug the HDR into the Environment Map and keep the Draw Dome set to no. Iray will still use the Map for lighting purposes. You can go under Render Setting>Progressive Rendering>Max Time and set that to 0. It will force the render engine to keep rendering until it reaches Max Samples or until it hits convergence. Also, go into Render Settings>Progressive Rendering>Max Samples and increase the samples. I usually have mine set for about 10000 to 15000. If you are doing a final render, I would also go to Render Settings>Progressive Rendering>Rendering Quality and change that to at least 5. It will also help with your final render. The default is set to 1 and I find increase the quality helps substantially. Once you get your lighting squared away, it looks like it would be a nice render. I hope all of this helps.
The darker the iray render the more time it needs to clear up the "fireflies". Knittingmommy has offered some great advice.
Another setting to look at with low light renders is Tone Mapping. The ISO, f/stop etc settings are the same as what would be used for digital photography. Try increasing the ISO setting from 100 to either 200 or 400. The other Tone Map settings will change automatically.
The other thing you must know about Tone Mapping is that the default settings are for the bright sunny day seen in the default HDRI environment map. If your scene isn't lit for a bright sunny day, then you must adjust the Tone Mapping settings to allow for the difference. It's just like a real manual camera — you can't use "sunny" settings on a dull cloudy day or indoors and expect to get a good picture.
Thank you all for your suggestions. I will go back and re-work the lights and settings again.
I did a test a month ago and discussed it in my Art Studio thread, with increasing the Rendering Quality and I personally didn't get substantial results that would warrant the increased render time- and it really can increase that a lot. Several other folks stated they didn't see enough of a difference when they tried it, to warrant the increased time. I'm not doubting that you did, and curious though as to whether anyone has some examples of where they tested it and got different results? Perhaps it depends on how much light is in the scene. Mine was a typical daytime setup.
If you are speaking of the white in her hair at the ends, it could just be as easy as doing some slight adjustments to the surface settings for the hair to turn off or lower any "gloss" that may have been put on it. I know I do that with most of the hair (turn down any metallic, glossiness, spec etc on the hair). Not sure if you are speaking specifically of that but thought I would mention that generally takes some surface settings adjustments to tame down to where you need it depending on your lighting :)
In one of my renders for this month's newbie contest, I still had a lot of fireflies on my character's leg because of the lighting and the shadows in that particular spot. While I tried just increasing the time, I still had fireflies. Upping the quality actually helped to reduce the fireflies to none. I saw an improvement. Admittedly, my render did take about 14 hours to complete rendering. However, my system allows me to run a render and still be able to do anything I want in other programs. It isn't a top of the line system, but I don't seem to notice a lot of the lagging or other problems that others seem to experience while rendering and system resources being low. To me it was worth the extra render time to get rid of the fireflies by increasing the render quality. Increaling the quality may not help on all types of render issues, but it helped my last two renders to increase the quality to 5. I don't know if it is just the lighting or the effects that I was using, but I put it out there as a suggestion. I'm slowing slogging through all of the Iray information that everyone has gathered, but I get impatient and want to actually render so I push buttons and sliders to find out what happens. I haven't made it to that point in your thread, yet, where you mention this or I would have commented on my recent experience with it. It is possible I just managed to have a bizarre set of circumstances where increasing the quality helped. I won't know for sure until I have more Iray renders under my belt. All I can do is offer advice from my current experience just like anyone else and hope others, like you, who have more experience chirp in like you did in this thread and offer even better advice. BTW, I love your thread and there is a lot of advice there that I am slowly incorporating into my own renders. It is slow going though because it has been around for a long time and I just recently started reading it.
LOL, yeah there's 1500 posts in each of the first 5 threads and this one changed with the new forum so it's more posts than that. I would use the Reference Links that I put near the front of the current thread- for a couple years, I put links to the best posts in the various sections. It will even pinpoint sections in my threads which have good information. I'd recommend looking at the Lighting section, because I went through and tested a lot of the products with the characters at World Center. (translation x/y/z is 0/0/0) so you'll know what light sets work well and they're included in products- no extra spending required. Try Tiki Island, Tomb of Helena (only $1.99) and Barn Yard.
Speaking of which, here's a tip- once you've determined which lights work well from World Center, move your sets, not your characters and your lighting will be good from the get-go!
Thank you all again for the help. God how i luv this community! Anyways, I took a lot of the info and did a new render and took the advice and this is what I got. I am really happy, but it still needs work.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9197201/Lady.png