Hi all 
A long-time question that i never answered since ‘ambient’ light disappeared
Look at this pic:
Shadows are too dark.
Can anyone please explain me how to make them more bright ?
Thanks and happy blending !
If you are creating a scene using only lights, you need to install more lights.
Or you should use HDRI.
When the material is dark, the dark areas do not brighten even in Cycles.
It can feel darker than the existing scene. (I don’t know if the scene is EEVEE or Cycles 
)
If you have lights, but it’s dark, it’s a problem.
thanks for you answer
Sorry i forgot to say i use cycles.
The material under the roofing is exactly the same as the wall on the left.
The light is a sun with a strength of 15 ( setting it to 1000 is almost inefficient ) and 1K bounces.
Boosting the strength of the world shader does nothing to the shadow but brighten all the other parts of the scene…
I dont understand the use of most of the ‘light path’ node ( 11 out of 13 are ineffective )…
Have you any idea please ?
Are you using an HDRI for the world? If you are and the sun is already really bright then it could be a problem on the materials setup, not the lighting. There should be no need to max out the Light Paths bounces.
How does it look if you use a simple grey material for everything?
EDIT:
Here’s what I mean about the influence of materials. It’s a simple scene with all the default render settings, and a sun with Strenght =1
Look at the difference when I add a simple material to the ground
Also, if you use Fast GI Approximation you can make the shadows lighter
On the left I used these settings for the GI Approximation
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The lights come from the back of the building.
There is no configuration inside that allows light to come in.
It doesn’t seem to have environmental lighting either.
It seems natural to be dark in cave-like structures.
You can use Color Management settings as a way to mitigate strong shades.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/color_management.html
You can also choose AgX or Filmic.
Alternatively, adjust Exposure and Gamma
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@julperado thanks very very much !!!
This simply solved my problem 
I forgot to say in my first post that my material uses AO baked formerly. And i didn’t talk about it as removing this baked AO for viewport render changes almost nothing.
I came to understand that my problem was the AO generated by cycles but i had no idea of how to modulate/remove it… I found no way anywhere to say << I don’t want AO for render >>
and fast GI approx just does this
Strangely i never gave a look to this render option as it sounds like cheap crappy rendering to time gain and i don’t know why dev put such an important thing ( AO ) in it…
@oo_1942 Thanks also for your answers
Indeed, the idea of a ‘fake’ light is as crappy as good 
Good because it can often solve may cases, and crappy because a real ray-trace should not those cheats.
I use the often for injecting light inside my towers through arrowslits for my AO/lighting bake, but for a scene this wide:
Area lights are not a viable option
For your info, i need to bake AO because the final scene is not intended to be used in blender but in unity3D, where user can do whatever he want with shaders ( wich is not the case in blender )
Thanks to all for this great help and happy blending & christmas fests !!
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By default, Cycles is setup to give the realistic and physical results, which is what most users look for. AO is an approximation and is less realistic than what Cycles usually does, especially if you use it in add mode which adds extra light everywhere. If it wasn’t labelled as an approximation in the render settings, lots of people would ruin the realism of their render without understanding how and would complain to the developpers.
Many artists starting today don’t realize what AO is and what its original purpose was. Early renderers (and many game engines still) didn’t have proper global illumination. Instead, they would add ambient light that just evenly brightened everything, so shadows weren’t pitch black. Ambient light looks flat and unrealistic, so AO was used to shade it, making it look like the fake bounce light is shadowed.
Your original image is actually realistic for a sky of this dark color. If you brighten the dark areas with ambient light, you create a stylized look, which is completely fine, as long as you are aware of what the AO is doing.
Fast Gi is fine, but it lacks control over the color of the AO. If you want more control, you can instead add the AO in the materials (with an Add shader and an AO node at the end of the node tree). This allows you to control not only the color of the AO, but also change its range per material.
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@etn249 gave a way better explanation of what I was going to say hehe.
But yes, in short, if you use baked AO as part of a shader in Cycles you’re going to mess up with the render result, because depending on how the material is setup (adding the baked AO or multiplying it) you’ll be either adding light or making the shadows darker.
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