A photo of an overcast sky has a low dynamic range, while a photo that includes both the bright sun on a clear day and the entrance to a dark cave has a potentially high dynamic range.Ĭameras usually can’t capture all this high dynamic range in a single shot – the sun will be completely over exposed, or the dark cave will have so much noise/grain you won’t be able to discern any details inside of it.

Dynamic range – The measure of variance in brightness that an image has – basically the difference between an image’s brightest and darkest points.

I’ll be throwing around some fancy words that may mean different things in different contexts, so let me clarify what I mean here first: A list of these articles can be found at the end, though some of the articles will be linked to throughout as well.īefore we begin, let’s make sure we understand each other properly.

I’m only going to cover only the basics here, and then follow up with a number of smaller articles for specific situations in order to avoid going on too many tangents. It’s not difficult to make an HDRI that’s good enough for your own use, but if you want to make really good HDRIs that provide accurate and dependable lighting no matter the use case, you need to thoroughly understand every step of the process and how it will affect the outcome. My goal with this series of articles is to explain everything I’ve learnt about creating HDRIs in order to try and raise the standard of quality of HDRIs shared online.

Raylectron