Thank you Alex... you just show up on right time... I was hopping as well for :) today my new mirror balls  are here so I will tell you all what is the quality this time so wait with the orders until tonight, from the product description they was well done I hope so ...I cross my fingers and wait excited.. the most of the Gazing Ball surface have a little strange deformation b/c they are hand made.. the new one I ordered was high polished and nice done.. you know a little deformation on the surface can put the light total in a wrong direction so the lightprobes can be used only for Diffuse HDRLight what is nice also but hard to match with the background... I tested the size of the lightprobe 250x250 and 500x500 made not difference at all but with resolution 500x500 the rendering was just slower... one more thing, when you import LDR image to the HDRshop and it ask for the Display Curve of your camera choice 1,0  it will looks bright but after your export it to hdr the contrast will get back to normal..then you can use the lightprobe.hdr direct with your background without to spend time on setting the intensity and IBL Contrast... and if still not match just remember that Intensity is the Direct illumination ( light from the sun ) and the IBL Contrast is the indirect Illumination colored-light reflected from the objects and blue sky, how higher the IBL Contrast how lower the indirect illumination mean the colors will fade out to grey..

I made for you something yesterday, pls remember that I used HDR Tone mapped Lightprobe with 7 exposures , how more photos you use to merge how more you can get from the Light Probe, you need minimal 3.. max 26 photos...
I read yesterday about a HDR MAP that was made using special HDR automatic 50 Megapixels camera, the final photo was 800 MB.. I can only imagine the quality of the sphere map, the best thing was that the camera did this everything automatic, just one click ... a dream that would never come true..

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"Surrender to what it is - Let go of what was - Have faith in what will be "