Quick Tut - Make your own HDRi - with free samples

Turns out making HDRi lighting is really simple in PS. Here’s a quick how-to. I’m sure there are better ways, but for some quick, dirty, but effective lighting this should be able to help you out. The zip file contains some sample files shown in the image.

Background

1. In PS create a new document. I tend to go for 5000 x 2500, but adjust to your own taste with a 2:1 ratio. It should be 32 bit for the bit depth.

2. Give it a background colour. I’d go for black or gray initially while you’re learning, but can be whatever you want.  You can makeup a sort of studio background shape for this too – however this is outwith the scope of this little tut.

Lights

The lights and where they’re placed are obviously the important bit. Your flat image is basically a warped sphere and it can take a little bit of time to get your head around where stuff is happening and coming from. Assuming that all your environment stuff is default then the image below should give you an approximation of where lights will be effective. Imagine the left hand side has the model facing you the right has them facing away. the lights on the left will affect the back of the model, the ones on the right will effect the front. There can be some warping issues, but that again is outside the scope of this little tutorial. 

1. Make a new layer

2. Use a soft round brush for a soft edged light – whatever size you want - the bigger the brush the more light. Or  make a hex shape and fill it on - a square - a polygon. I tend to stick with what I would use in a photographic studio. Round, Hex or Square. Just play about with sizing or look at my references for a rough guide.

3. Create a new exposure layer above your light then right click it and create clipping mask. This will allow you to adjust the exposure for that light only. I set exposure to 3 - you can always adjust in Daz by moving the Environmental Intensity.

4. Now add more lights if you want by doing the same again.

5. Save out as radiance or openexr.

Done!

Load it into your environmental map and you have your very own custom HDRi.

That’s about it. Pretty easy. Obviously where you position the lights determines where the light falls on the subject. Again – check my little reference pic for a rough guide.

Other tips :

You can rotate the environment to move the light of lights around your subject or move your subject to fall into the light path.

You can colour the lights to be whatever colour you want

You can change the tone mapping in the environment to change the lighting quality

You can use LIE to stack single lights on top of each other 

Hope you find this useful.

SC