adjusting contrast in hdr?

[emartin8907]

Hi,

I've been having to use some really crap hdrs lately and am looking for ways in maya to adjust contrast/ gamma/ get sharper shadows.

I found this interesting thread where they talk about using two dome lights one for ambient and one for reflections, but it's a few years old and I can't quite follow one of the steps.

"add the 'texture input gamma' Vray attibute to the HDRI file node to adjust its gamma, and adjust it's 'brightness' by using the 'v' value in the HDRI's Color Balance > Color Gain swatch."
http://www.cgskies.com/resources_tutorial_rendering.php

EDIT just found it duh its the value attribute in the color rollout. I'm excited to try this

[yolov]

Beside the color balance of the file node, you can always pipe it through a color correct node (the ones that come with the lookDevKit with 2016.5) for example (or any other color correction node for that matter).

[smbell]

There are rarely any HDRs that have the shadows fidelity I want as well.

What I do is open the HDR in photoshop, cut out the sun with a circle selection tool, exact precision doesn't matter too much as long as you get the hot part, you can use the eye dropper to measure the color range (sometimes you need to temporarily drop an exposure adjustment layer on to get the image into a visible range)... Then I paste it back on top with add overlay mode. Then I duplicate the sun layer six or seven times with every layer on add. Again, use the dropper tool to measure the value, it depends on what you start with, but eventually you will get up in the 200 - 300 range and your shadows will be nice and crisp while keeping the original color of the sun and mood of the image. The sky will remain the way it is and only the sunlight will change! You can group all your extra suns and link a hue saturation to them to fine tune the sun color.