With standard Blender materials you can brighten a material or texture by adjusting the diffuse color or the emit value or by using the brightness slider on the texture panel.
Is there any other way to adjust a material/image texture brightness in Cycles other than to add an emission node to the object’s material node tree? 
You can always use a color mix node along with a value node to create an RGB value that goes higher than 1 in one or more channels.
However you might get a lot of noise in some cases as it would be reflecting more light than it receives.
It seems to me there should be a more direct way to control brightness of a material than what I see in the material nodes. Of course I may be overlooking something. Using a color mix node or an emission node to adjust the brightness of a material or image seems extreme to me and could cause complications with the overall scene. Of course you can always brighten an image in Gimp…
If you want to brighten the whole scene then you can just raise the exposure value in the render panels or raise the emission power of the lamps.
If what you’re looking for is just the equivalent of the diffuse reflectivity slider in BI’s material system then you should just set the color inside of the shader node to something brighter.
Though if the brightness you’re after is only possible through an emission node, then you should then use the light path node to restrict the visibility of the emission to camera rays to prevent it from contributing any light.
My problem in this case is that the material I’m using is an image, UV mapped. After shuffling nodes around I came up with this configuration:
I’m glad you mentioned this:
“…use the light path node to restrict the visibility of the emission to camera rays to prevent it from contributing any light.” I’ve made a note of that. That’s important and will come in handy down the line.
Thanks for the help…
