Population brightness issue

[AP]

I looked throughout the older posts concerning how to realistically light populations, however with every proposed solution tried there are still issues. I am trying to make the trees bright enough while still being realistically dark within the confines of the shaded areas of terrain. The tree diffuse is at 1 and changing it to 2 causes the trees to stick out in the shadows and appear almost floating. Enviro light is at 2, sunlight is at 5 and I do not want that any more bright, GI is 2,4,8. I do not want to change the light exposure as I want to stay more true to the overall lighting. Translucency is at 0.2 as was suggested in another post. Perhaps make some changes in the GISD? Currently the occlusion weight is at 1.5, bounce is 1 and radius is at 24.

[Dune]

I think it looks pretty good. Higher GI generally lights up all shadows, so you have to take care not to overdo that. Translucency has the tendency to lighten trees too much is shadowed areas, but 0.2 should be safe. If you want the trees in shadow to be lighter, you could raise that to 0.5 or so and see what happens.

[AP]

I will have to explore those options, no doubt.