I want the window to be pure white without affecting the light and I have tried tons of HDRI with different settings and interior lights too. But it’s not as brightly lit as the reference. I have also played with color balance, exposure and Gamma.
Reference:
These are the settings:
Do I need to crank these settings even higher??
Change your color management from Filmic to Standard
wait. But isn’t filmic supposed to be better?
I don’t have the mental capacity to answer this question fully, so let me just say- if you want pure white (255,255,255), you can’t get it with Filmic out of the box. Filmic is better in some cases, but Standard gives you 1:1 color. Try it and see what you think 
With a little color grading… I don’t really see that much of a problem. And I really wouldn’t use the srgb color transform, it just makes everything more complicated.
The remaining tweaks I would do in the materials, or with cryptomattes in compositing. I don’t really see the point in trying to do this without grading/compositing.
Your indirect clamp is very low, increasing that will make everything brighter
If you see the shower section in the reference pic, you will see the light is actually going through and creating a bright environment with a full white entering through the window. Even with higher clamp (25 instead of 3) and standard view transform, the scene still looks dull. I think the materials are pretty fine. @SterlingRoth
I tried Standard and it makes the render way worse 
Well, the albedo of the texture you are using looks darker than the tiles in the reference, so that will make it darker, but you can also just add lights, use light passes, cryptomattes and compositing to get the result you want. At least that’s what I would do. Fake it until it looks about right. And just out of curiosity, have you tried turning off clamping and multiplying the hdri strength by, say 5 while turning all other lights down? Just a wild guess, not much more I can do without the file.
Set indirect clamping to 0, see if that helps.
If it does but you get fireflies - try then setting it at a higher value (say 25) then gradually reduce it until the fireflies dissapear.
I have tried 0 indirect clamp which makes everything super dark. I have tried IC with values at 15, 25, 50 and 100. @hi_there_dear_john I am trying this for days and nothing seems to give me that kind of lighting.
There must be something wrong with your scene. Setting clamp to 0 deactivates the clamping (meaning there should be more light, not less) - it certainly shouldn’t make things dark.
I will show it from the viewport
Remove HDRI saturation with a Hue/Saturation node, but because of global illumination white will always have different tones. It’s better to see white as a brain interpretation than a color, there’s no pure white in real world. Cientificly you need to look straigh to the sun without sunglasses at noon to ‘see’ white. Use false color in color managment to adjust proper exposure.
I may say something stupid, but aren’t HDRI bad to illuminate interior scenes? I would never do that. It only creates unnecessary noise and slower renders and unless you direct the sun of your HDRI directly through the window you will never achieve the result you want unless you increase the HDRI intensity to huge levels.
If you look at the reference image, the sun is coming through the window and you can’t see anything from outside, so what’s the point with the HDRI?
Well, if you have any window in your interior scene and that window allows the sky background to send light inside the room, it will be the same challenge no matter if you have an HDRI or a flat background. So, if your interior scene has a window and the outdoors is brights, you will for sure get more noise.
But, there is a way to help with that problem: light portals. You place an area light in the window, check the light portal option and now the area light will stop emitting light and will instead tell Cycles to sample the window. Note that this only helps with light from the world background / HDRIs.
The exposure is kinda hard to manage if I want such a bright interior light.
@Calandro I thought HDRI is necessary for photorealism. To get the correct reflections. I am getting better results with HDRI as to no HDRI. And I have no idea how to brighten the light through the window so bright yet keeping the ambient light in check,
@etn249 I have a window and a door. That’s the first thing I tried. It created more noise and longer render times. So I removed it.
I experimented with a lot of stuff that’s why I am here asking about it. However I am trying the “fake it” method and getting somewhere.
