Appearances of a scene depend on lighting tweaks, less so much system performance. I can get away with screenshots, because you don't have to see how lolworthy blue planet on insane is at 2-10 fps. In fact, Crysis maxed out and with heavy TOD tweaking at 1080p is a godly pretty slideshow on my laptop.
I got the lighting to look like that by going into the main-f.sdr file and tweaking the relevant values. My emphasis has been on a realistic look without overdone specular effects. I do agree that the lighting's a bit dark at times, so I'll see what I can do without making ships look fake. I started playing with the shader file directly after realizing that half the lighting flags don't work anymore, and the other half don't cover what I want to change.