Thanks very much, very helpful information. lol@pakled, how very true. =) sackrat- Looks pretty cool. I've considered getting C4D, but I'm going to be learning Maya in school and that's enough cash expenditure for me. I may also have to get 3DS Max, so much cash flow going on here, cash flow away from me that is. =) As for doing a forum search, I'd prefer to try and develop my own techniques, which is why I would like to understand exactly what it is and how more powerful programs like C4D do it. I went ahead and did a forum search to see what I was looking at, and found the technique drac presents. It seems to me that this would not be useful in a very wide variety of circumstances, never mind the fact that you have to download images to use from the internet (something I'm just not willing to do), or learn photography, which may come later for me in college. madmax- Hmm... so HDR just means that it expects a lot more colors to be available, colors that aren't there on the monitors? Then these colors are replaced with white because they aren't there? Then, at least for a regular monitor, HDR seems to me to be a method by which we can create more realistic colors. =)