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The Lights effect, (found under Effects > Illumination > Lights...) comes with 24 presets, or you can create your own custom effect. It's easiest to start with a preset, and then edit it to your own tastes.

There are five lights. Each can be selected individually by either clicking on the light dot in the left preview pane or by clicking on the light buttons at the bottom of the preset pane. In addition, each light can be adjusted individually for lightness/darkness, on/off, color, intensity, direction, smoothness, light position, cone size, and asymmetry. That's a bit of a mouthful, so let's take a look at this.

Learning to operate a digital camera isn't always the easiest thing, so if you've got one (and even if you don't), you probably have some terribly under-exposed images that you wish you could salvage. There are other ways of lightening an under exposed photo, through layers and blend modes, but they don't quite add the soft touch and atmosphere of the lights effect. The examples to the right were created by starting with the Effects > Illumination > Lights Pre-set: Floodlight. The Darkness was set to 81, and the Color to pale yellow on all three. The top image is the original.
light 5: Intensity: 90 direction: 200 Horizontal: 0 Vertical: 0 Smoothness: 80 Scale: 10 Cone Size: 40 Asymmetry: 1 Light 3: Intensity: 40 Direction: 307 Horizontal: 96 Vertical: 95 Smoothness: 28 Scale: 10 Cone Size: 45 Asymmetry: 327
Light 2: Intensity: 40 Direction: 245 Horizontal: 107 Vertical: -100 Smoothness: 28 Scale: 10 Cone Size: 45 Asymmetry: 500 Light 5: Intensity: 90 direction: 200 Horizontal: 0 Vertical: 0 Smoothness: 80 Scale: 10 Cone Size: 40 Asymmetry: 1
Only lights 3 and 5 and lights 2 and 5 were used respectively on the second and third image. All other lights were "turned off". For the bottom image, lights 2, 3, and 5 were on, 1 and 4 off. This bottom image is for those of you who might see these images as still too dark, here's a sample set with the darkness setting lowered and the intensity increased. My personal preference is the softer light, but given the different operating systems, plus personal settings, I realize the above examples may not come across the web as they appear to me.

Now let's look at the individual settings, and see if we can't get a handle on this thing.

Getting the Most From Your Effects
Getting the Most From Your Effects
The Light Effect Dialog Box