Poly Haven
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What is Clipping? Precursor to workflow articles.
🕑 Added 2018-12-06 14:37:52 +0000 UTC While I was working on my promised (and seriously overdue) workflow articles, particularly one about capturing the sun and other bright light sources correctly, I thought it would be a good idea to explain the basics of clipping in a separate post as it might be interesting to all of you even if you're not bothered about making your own HDRIs.Clipping is in a nutshell what makes an HDRI good or bad. There are of course other measures of quality, but in my opinion the most important thing about an HDRI is whether or not it stores the true and full dynamic range possible for the lighting it is trying to capture, or if the data is incomplete.
This makes the biggest difference when the sun is visible in the HDRI, since it's a prime example of a stupidly bright and stupidly small (relative to the entire panorama) light source. But in other situations it's important too.
This article explains in detail what exactly it means for an HDRI to be "clipped" or "unclipped", and what difference that makes when using it in your 3D scene.
Comments
Poly Haven
Blender and Krita are both free and show histograms for 32-bit images. Gimp might work too. Though I think they all only show the 0-1 range in the histogram and ignore anything outside of that.
Philip bazel
Great article..... I wish there was a free cheap HDRI histogram. That would be useful.
Grant Inouye
I am so interested in this!!! I just came back from a trip to japan and took a ton of brackets with the theta and want to make HDRIs. The problem is that it's the theta and the brackets are in jpg so clipping and creating the HDRI's the right way is really important for me. looking forward to learning more about the process you use!
