HDR images (Patreon)

Hey,

continuously I am researching how I can further improve the quality of my artworks.

A big issue with 3D renders are indoor scenes. It's always too dark.

And why is it doo dark? Because we don't use enough light.
And why don't we use enough light? Because of white clipping.

Uhh white... what?
All you of you know white clipping. If you take a photo with your digital camera and it's too bright, some parts of your image may have loose of details and everyting get's white.

Just take a look at that render:

It's rendered in SDR (Standard Dynamic Range). If you take a look at the floor you see that the wood is lost in white, where the sun shines.

The next image is rendered in HDR, which means I just render the image in 32Bit instead of 8bit:

It's the same render, just in 32bit. You may regocnize the details are mainted.
A happy ending?
Of course not.

Rendering in 32bit has a big disadaventage. Our screens can't interpate these 32bit images. So we have to tonemap them back to 8bit. 🤦
Apps like Affinity Photo or Adobe Photoshop can do that.

After the tonmapping I experience that colors may be changed in a way that I didn't expect.

Let's take a look at a test render of an image with may become a new single page caption:

The guy with the bald on the right has a much too red skin, after the tonmapping.

I expierecned similar issues in Wonderlamp where I rendered same of the latest images also in HDR: Mark's hair is much too red, or the black mousepad of Mark's computer start's to glow red. Not so cool :)

That's all stuff that can be fixed in postwork, but still annoying.

Last example is from Changed - Sorcerer's Apprentice
Yes, I know some people are waiting that I continue that story... that's why I started to prepare some stuff for that. Here is an image of Valentin's new outfit.

That's how it's look in HDR:

That's how it's come out in 8bit SDR:

And that's the SDR image after my default postwork:

Which of these do you like most?
The HDR image is of course very contrasty, has more details and looks a little bit more artificial. But that's the nature of HDR images, I think ;)