Making HDRI environments from scratch in Photoshop

Making HDRI environments from scratch in Photoshop

I added a tutorial on my site dealing with creating a reusable template for Photoshop to make HDRI images to light your scenes. Hopefully, this can be useful for someone:

Radiance HDRI for Cheetah3
 
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Thank you for the new link. Thow, i can see that to make a 32 bits image in Photoshop we have to use a version higher than the cs2 one ...:smile: Thank you just the same ...

The french user ...
 
I think you will get even better results if you deliberately paint in light sources (otherwise, you might as as well use PNGs instead) using blown out whites (note how in your renders, the bright spots appear in reflections, but the shadow is really being cast by the sky.

  1. Once you've painted your background -- switch to Photoshop's View > 32 Bit Preview Options... and pick highlight compression.
  2. Now make a Brush that's completely 40px diameter, 0% hard.
  3. Set mode to Lighten.
  4. Go into the color picker, and select white with +8 stops (i.e. 256x brighter than the white already in the scene.
  5. Click on the brightest light source in the scene with your brush.
  6. Deal with other light sources similarly (varying brush size and brightness and color accordingly)
  7. Now make the same brush 300-500px in size, set the color to +2 stops, and click it on top of the light sources (this fakes in glare).
  8. Now save it and try a render.
 

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