HDR Help

[Boofredlay]

I am impressed with the results Oliver has been getting with hdr lighting however I am not having such good results.
The hdr image is very washed out.

Here are my test shots. Thanks for any advice.

This one was done with background color black, sunlight enabled. (few passes - preset 10)

PP01.jpg (741.4 KiB) Viewed 11358 times

This one was done with an hdr image brightness of .7, sunlight disabled. (few passes - preset 10)

PP02.jpg (699.13 KiB) Viewed 11358 times

Here is the preview image for the hdr I used (found online somewhere). The hdr is 1.6M, too large to upload here.

[Ecuadorian]

Did you try with sunlight disabled?
Also, check that you're loading them as spherical skies. Those are not very bright, so I rise the HDR brightness over 1. and render them with Medium+ or higher from the Alternative AA folder.

[Boofredlay]

Yes sunlight disabled.
Loading as a Sky Probe.

[Chris]

Needs to be Spherical Sky, not Sky Probe. "Probes" are images that look like circles.

[Ecuadorian]

Like these:
http://www.debevec.org/probes/

[Boofredlay]

Ok, thanks.
So I loaded it as a spherical sky and still got a washed out result.
I then loaded a the uffizi_probe.hdr as a sky probe. Also a washed out result but better.
Attached are the settings and result. Notice how much more rich the colors are in the first image in my original post. I feel lost.

[Ecuadorian]

Yup, with HDRs things tend to look more natural... or washed out, depending on your point of view.

[Ecuadorian]

You can always lower the gamma for a more contrasty look... or even better, save the .hdr and open it for tonemapping in an external software, such as Motiva RealCamera.

[Boofredlay]

Thanks Miguel.

[olishea]

I missed this thread, sorry bout late reply.I was gonna say eric, you are not supposed to use them as a probe but it seemed to work well for a couple of images I made.

Your initial hdr image looks like it should...but lower gamma a bit and up the exposure. this will get that nice contrast. all my images appeared quite flat and boring til they were spiced up with tone mapping.

That's why I used hdr brightness of 0.7....because I'd rather have a duller image (with tone mapping in mind) than an overexposed image that you can't do anything with. Sometimes my gamma will be 0.85 and my exposure 2.2-it depends on the scene and the look you are trying to achieve. Linear tone mapping seems more realistic while simple seems to give the image more punch and saturation. why not save two different versions of same image and overlay the in PS? this is how to get round a washed out hdr lit image. hope this helps pal

[edit] and of course disable sunlight for studio hdr (unless you want a beam of light shining through object etc)....and dont forget to rotate the hdr so you get the best lighting for the scene, again, trial and error with low res testers.

even this image you have produced which is washed out looks a lot more realistic than with just sunlight IMO...just needs that tone mapping.