For those of you who are experienced in using HDRI images to light exterior scenes…how do you go about keeping the blue HDRI sky from bleeding BLUE all over the scene? So far the saturation spinner has helped alittle…but is there a better way?
thnks
ST
Use HDR shop to make a desaturated version of the map. Then in max use a mix map to mix the two together to control the saturation of the HDRI light
But Personally I would never use HDRI for lighting arch viz work.
have a look at this tutorial:
i agree…i tried it a few times and never got good results for lighting.
also for reflections. maybe it’s good for a skyscraper.
of course dschaga will disagree 
That’s a good tutorial, but you will have the same results if you put a direct light in the scene for your sun, and mix the hdr with a desat version to make it less blueish. And it will be waaaaaaaay faster to render and give you decent shadows.
A hdri is the lighting info for the point in space where the shot was taken. If you go 2m further away from that point, the lighting will be proabably different. So for large scenes a hdri is useless and even incorrect.
Some people even put a hdri in the environment slot when rendering an interior, which is even more useless.
Don’t get me wrong, I love HDRI 
but it’s used too much for wrong reasons imo.
wouter
eh .. plastic, no, i don’t disagree.
The result of all my hdri research was another project/research 1 1/2 years ago:
http://sdr.cgtechniques.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi
it’s exactly that mixture of using lowres sky hdri with a keylight you would like to have ..and we added a LDR hires Background image to this tool too.
So you will have a download which contains a very hires JPG spherical panorama (~600-900kb), an lowres hdr (~100kb) and a little textfile with all informations about mappings , keylight lightcolor and so on…
Blochi and me wrote two scripts to load the the items with the textfile description automatical and identical into lightwave OR 3dsmax … then another friend wrote a mel script for maya and ther was also a cinema alphaversion.
..we called it smart dynamic range, but few month ago we decided to interupt development, since there was no requests or understanding for this solution.
