Help with dark shadows in CS:1

[cobalt prism]

I'm really getting frustrated with shadows being so dark. Like, everything that isn't directly facing the sun is almost black, trees, buildings, everything. No matter what time of day, what theme, etc. I'm playing on PC with lots of mods, but the relevant ones would seem to be Render It! and maybe Play It! or ACME. I'm using Aguille Verte theme by Ecania, and I've tried every LUT I could find but have currently configured Render It! to use the RelightCool LUT. Nothing really seems to help. I've cranked up the Sun Intensity in Render It to 3, anything higher blows out all the brighter parts. Shadow strength is low at 0.23. Shadow Bias makes no difference that I can see. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious but I can't figure out what, and I've been banging my head on this off and on (mostly off) for a couple of years now. The picture is an example of what I see - taken at 11:00am.

[spark urchin]

maybe the exposure value? it's been a while, might be time to go reset all the settings and follow a guide to get it to look somewhat okay

[cobalt prism]

I did try playing with the exposure setting in Render It. In the image it's set to 1, any darker makes everything worse, any brighter starts to wash out the lit parts. At 1.2 the shadows are still too dark, the grass is a light lime green, and everything not in shadow is overexposed.