Hey there.
I was testing the Andrew Price Tip to make correctly HDRi Environments in Blender 2.8, this is the results comparison:
For me, the best result is the right image. The lighter areas looks good and the shadow areas aren’t that dark.
I hope it be useful!
Peace
You are changing the intensities of the original HDRI. If the original HDRI is exactly what you wanted the first image should be the best. In the last image you have made it dimmer then boosted the brightness of the entire HDRI. Whatever you like best.
Hey @watercycles,
The last image is not increasing all the HDRi, on really are making the darkness area looks more brightness, but keeping brigthness in the iluminated area.
The original tutorial (from Blender Guru) are to increase the sharpness shaddows, but isn’t working for me… so I make this tests to compare the variables result.
I really liked the last image to make external architecture images, beacuse in some projects the shaddows areas looks so darkness when I adjuste the strange and expose to capture the brightness areas. On really, just given more control when using HDRi.
The Blender Guru tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI_FMa-8w50
Don’t mess with the HDRI image, if it is a correctly captured one i.e. it has all the dynamic range needed to cover the brightest point and the darkest point in the image. This is what will give you photorealistic results. If you want to control the dark side of your object, you can add fill lights or reflectors as photographers would, or do it when grading your render.
He does this in his tutorial because the sun intensity is clipped in his HDRI. He says that you get accurate lighting by doing this trick, but even if it “looks” more realistic, there is nothing accurate about this method.
You can use this method to control the lighting to your liking of course, it’s always good to have artistic control, but it’s not physically correct.
