Poser's IBL is problematic in the directional sense - you can rotate the light with the light sphere, but it is guesswork as to where the positions are.  The one thing that I like about Cinema 4D's is that you map the HDRI onto a sphere which is then positionable and rotatable to get the desired results.

Don't have the version of Photoshop with HDRI, but that is an excellent place to stitch and generate it I would suppose.  Are you faking the intensities by saturation or do you have a separate set of greyscale exposure photos?

Best of luck with your experimentation!  I haven't had the luxury of time to devote to actually doing my own HDRI images - would be cool to take the panorama or mirror ball all the way through.

One thing to note about Poser - there is HDRI in Poser 7, but only IBL in Poser 6.  These are slightly different approaches.  IBL is basically HDRI without the H. :)  It uses the standard RGB to do the lighting.  So I'm not certain if the HDRI is applied to the scene in the exact same way as the IBL - might be.  In that case, you do get the full spherical surround but, as noted, not the graphical control.  I do all of my HDRI and GI in Cinema 4D as Poser is too slow and quirky for me.

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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