Well well well. I take back some of what I said. I read the vray link, and although I knew the things it said, I didn't quite know the absolute importance of 12 EV dynamic range. I mean, I know that it's a ratio of 4096 to 1, but I've also assumed that photographers who make these HDRI know what they're doing and make sure to take the photos with a good EV range. It would seem they frequently do not.

Here is a render I just did in Poser, using one from this page:

http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html

called Desert Highway. I selected the image Road_to_MonumentValley_Ref.hdr from within that zip file.

At first, it produced the usual blue cast, no shadow render we see all the time. Then I used my EnvSphere nodes to manipulate the contrast, artificially boosting the dynamic range to a much higher level. I also increased my IDL samples to 8000.

Are you ready to see it?

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)