It's not just about the lights, exposure is important aswell because to get lights to behave in a believable way, decay is needed most of the time and decay creates a need for higher light intensity, which leads to areas around the light getting burned out by the time you get the light bright enough to be useful.

Exposure controls and brings it into a range that won't burn a hole into your eyes. You can use the exposure control in the Render View's color management or use a Mental Ray exposure shader in the environment slot of the camera. I talked a little about the latter here.


I have no clue what kind of lighting you're aiming for but after getting somewhat familiar with the differences between the six standard Maya lights there are some questions you could ask yourself(you'll probably find some of the light types not so useful).

What is the mood?

When you can answer that, then you can select a light type based on:

What/where is the light coming from?(sun, furnace, laser beam, candle?)

Visualizing what is generating the light goes a long way in helping you research and tune attributes like color, intensity, shadow softness etc.