I posted about this before (Light sources do not make textures brighter than texture source images - OpenGL: Basic Coding - Khronos Forums) and ended up implementing a workaround, but would like to know a better way. The same question was posted here by someone else but is outdated:
The workaround for me was to set TEXTURE_ENV to COMBINE, set RGB_SCALE_ARB to two, then halve the intensity of all light sources.
To elaborate on the subject, the amount of light applied to geometry appears to be clamped to the RGB values of the texture source image independent of material values used for color tinting. Bright lights “wash out” geometry so it appears ambiently-lit. Ideally a bright light near geometry should wash it out to white (supersaturate it). Here’s an animated gif of an exploding ship being effected by the problem:
http://eightvirtues.com/misc/Lighting.gif
To confirm, is this behavior normal? If it is normal, other than resorting to shaders, is there a better way to circumvent it? Thanks, and apologies if the workaround is still the best solution outside of using shaders.