@Artorp: Thats OK if we don’t see the sky… In the end we don’t notice the sky in this scene (if You look at the el pic we do actually see it) so it should work.
That’s why we have compositing 
to composite the sky in.
Yes, of course 
I was thinking of more complicated workarounds.
But it’s an area where we should not need workarounds. We should be able to set different world both colors and textures for lighting, reflection and background out of the box. And be able to use polar images for world texture. These are among the most screaming shortcomings of blender.
I can live with no neutral ray-tracer - theres external renderer if we need to and I have not needed to so far.
If we just get attenuation distance right so shadows are sane, place our light where the most important light sources are… Then we can tweak energies and colors to what pleas us. Theres allot of combinations that look good and do it look good it most likely lock fairly convincing to. I’m loving it!
If not try render with only el - most probably it’s attenuation distance that mess things up. If that’s messed up it just cant look right!
Thank you all, guys, this is a really informative thread.
Renders posted here prove that Blender Internal can give pretty good results with interiors, which are obviously challenging for lighting.
Keep it up!
Took another stab at this in LuxRender:
Got some photon noise on the curtains though. Part of me wants to load this up overnight with the Lux’s classic MLT mode and see how that comes out.
Thanks again LaH for your very helpful information. I’m already doing some changes, and thanks to you the improvement is impressive I’m also adding a few more stuff to the scene, fix some uvmaps and change some materials. As soon as I finish the changes I will upload the file.
J_the_Ninja apart of the noise the render is really nice
Thanks again everyone for your critics, suggestions, information and comments in general, thank you very much
I’m looking forward to seeing it!
The last one is impressive LaH!
also changed el to white from sky texture - we are indoor after all
What about a little crazy custom hdr lighting? Over saturated abstract-like composition.
Here is an updated version of the bedroom. I’ve added some more stuff, changed some materials and fixed de lights (maybe now is too orange?).
Thank you all for your suggestions 
Oh and a way to use a different color for the el and the sky is using a sun lamp with sky activated, that way the horizon color is used for the environment light, I think.
After composite:
Good work!
Light is a bit blown out, though.
Thanks Carrozza! Yes I still need to tweak the lights a little more.
Good - Your modeling and texturing is excellent. There’s still some shadows that don’t look natural to me. Some balance between light sources is wrong, maybe some source is missing or there some source to much. I have not time fore a while to look at the blend but here’s a pic pointing out the spots I find problematic. The one under the roof it is really the light triangle that spooks me - the other is just to strong shadows.
Attachments
You’re sort of jumping-around with the exposure, the film-type and so on. These are the kinds of “tweaks” that you can most easily do in the stage that Hollywood refers to as “color timing,” which is re-balancing the histogram curves of the final image after the image has been produced.
To my eye, the most important thing that you need to deal with is the windows, which are blown-out white in all of the exposures. This results in a loss-of-detail in those areas. And you do need some kind of detail there … either “curtains,” or something suggested to be present outside the window. I prefer curtains. Even a texture could be used. And you can certainly add these details to the image-file instead of grinding through another render. (There’s no rule that says that “what the renderer spits out” must be “the final image,” and it usually isn’t. “A picture is captured in the camera, but it’s made in the darkroom.”)
When you look at this shot in a histogram, you want a smooth, bell-shaped curve centered around the midtones. Right now you will see, in the various shots, “a flattened curve” (underexposed), and/or “a somewhat crater-shaped curve with spikes at either end” (the effect of the underexposed and overexposed areas, and low contrast). You might see “vertical blank lines slicing through the curve” if you have any arithmetic oddities going on. Photoshop, Gimp, and even Blender itself all provide histograms, and Blender provides several other color-assessment tools (vectorscope, etc.) as well. The advantage of using these tools is that they help you to quantify what your eye is telling you.
The most important thing is to have the detail present. If you are recording the output to a high dynamic-range (HDRI) format such as MultiLayer (OpenEXR), you might find that you have detail that is “whiter than white.” If the detail is there, you can adjust the image “in post,” using your “perfect digital darkroom.” Let the renderer produce the raw digital data, and plan to fine-tune the result “in post.” A perfectly legitimate practice, and routinely done.
My try… well sorry, just a fast 5min PP on the last BI render (before compositing).
Use sRGB color profile on your posts. Always.
Avoid compositor for static scenes like this. Never. lol
Always click to see the real image, this site discards color profiles when creating thumbnails.
Thanks LaH for noticing those shadows, I’m already fixing that.
sundialsvc4 thanks for your great explanation! I think, with my limited english, that I could understand the majority of it. Thank you very much!
michalis nice render