While brilliant for denoising and using LightMix on Corona EXRs, don’t forget that the CIE can also process any image saved to EXR - so older renders not saved to Corona EXR at the time, or even photography. While those don’t have the info needed to use LightMix and Denoising, it does mean you can use the familiar Corona tone mapping, vignette, bloom & glare etc on any image once in EXR format. Attaching a couple of photographs where I used it in this way while the CIE was in internal testing, as possible inspiration for others to give it a go too. So much easier than loading up Photoshop to tweak things - will be awesome once curves are added to the CIE too!
And you can save and load your settings to configs, handy when you get an effect you like (and can load those into the regular Corona VFB, and vice versa, as well).
I decided to do little comparison between few tonemappers that i have, PTGui, Picturenaut, ArionFX and new kid on the block - CIE. I didn’t take care to achieve results as close as possible, so the output is quite varying. Even exposure doesn’t match. Please do not take this test too seriously, as i haven’t skill and knowledge for such test. It was just fun exercise. I opted for global tonemapping since it’s CIE’s only option, except fot PTGui, which has only local tonemapping to offer.
+ excellent highlight recovery (rivals even local tonemapping), offers wide variety of tonemapping methods and other tools, tailored for CGI. - small preview size, requires photoshop.
