JPG to EXR library

i dont recall if i tried to do this before, so, there may be an old thread out there with something similar to this. what i'd like to do here is start a collection of .jpg's that folks have actually used to make .exr's which they then imported into the lighting environment.

the reason for this is that it's not very practical for FF to allow custom lighting environments (LE) to be uploaded into the library. the biggest barrier to that is copyrights. someone slips in a copyrighted image made into an LE and we've then got legal woes.

however, there is no reason we cant start our own library of .jpg's that we convert into .exr's and use ourselves. thus, the reason for this thread.

images used shld be as follows:

1. small and with an aspect ratio of 2 to 1, meaning something like 400 x 200, 200 x 100, 500 x 250 pixels and with a resolution of no more than about 300 ppi. this is just a general guideline. those with faster computers may not have difficulty with larger images. they do not have to be 2 to 1. i've used 400 x 400, but in general, 2 to 1 works best. orient your image to give the best use the LE sphere.

2. images shld NOT be copyrighted or, if they are copyrighted, then permissions need to have been granted for use in this manner. to keep this simple, if you post an image here for use in the LE, you are also giving full permission to use it anywhere and in any manner and not just within the LE of FF. so, dont post it if you dont want it to show up in youtube or somewhere else! my purpose for the thread is still to collect good .jpg's to make good .exr's to make good LE's, but it would be somewhat silly to try to regulate a copyrighted image posted here to only this use.

3. NO objectionable material. 'objectionable' here will be per the rules and guidelines of the forum as laid out by filter forge and their representatives. and, 'objectionable' remains at the discretion of the FF team.

4. any person posting an image here is hereby giving permission to use said image un-reservedly. that means, if you post an image here you are giving anyone and everyone permission to use that image, without compensation of any kind to yourself or your assigns, for any and all works produced using that image. in simple terms, if you post it, others can use it and you are entitled to nothing for having done so.

5. images from 'stock photo' libraries and other such repositories are fine, provided that permissions have been granted and particularly granted for royalty free use. DO NOT grab something off a stock photo site thinking that all those are freebies. they arent! the same applies to any other site on the internet. just because it's on the internet, does not mean it's royalty free and public domain and so forth.

6. dont make this a pain in the arse for the FF team. they've got better things to do than try to trace copyrights and see who is and isnt violating such. check your copyrights and permissions BEFORE posting! let's not make extra work for the folks that are working on building a better FF!

7. DO NOT use celebrity images! there is a whole area of legal crap you can get into on this one and again, we dont want to make this a headache for FF.

8. DO NOT use images of people unless you have obtained something on the order of a release from that person to use that image. this is similar to the celebrity issue.

9. test your images first. change your .jpg into an .exr and import it into the FF LE and see if it works and is worth having in the library. then post the .jpg.

10. i dont believe .exr is currently an allowed file format to upload here to the forums, at least not currently. it might be nice if it were, but i doubt it would display. so, use .jpg's so that we can all see the image first before we download it and try it out for ourselves. this keeps it simple.

ok, enough rules let's get to posting. if this works out, perhaps down the road this thread can be 'stickied'.

Please note that the images above are COPYRIGHTED and you MUST obtain the copyright holder's permission to use them -- do not resubmit them here.

It would be nice if someone posted an image of the inside of a church or cathedral with light beams coming through the colored glass windows.

and here's a screenshot of how it looks once imported.

these wont necessarily be stellar examples of lighting environments and may only work well in certain filters, but i wanted to show some examples and also to show that texture filters can be a great source of lighting environments. ron's orb filter is a texture filter and seems well suited to this and since it's such a stellar filter, i thought i'd make this the first one.

ok, this is one i took, so i guess i have permission to post it for use

this is 400 x 200 x 480 ppi and looks a bit like the 'forest' environment once rendered. it's a bit lighter but works pretty well.

I'm not having any luck getting a real metallic *shine* happening with any of the .jpg images I am importing to use for the HDRI lighting. They have more than enough white area that they should get that same shine that the sunlight from the built-in light source images produces, but they simply do not. What could be causing that ?

jffe

Waiting on imports suck.

I tried using PS to 'merge to HDR' using a RAW image that I just bump the brightness way up but it looked like crap. I think we may need the real thing to get good results.

Here is an image rendered with it.

I did on last night that took hours, I think it was 1200x600, and it did not end up looking any better than the 400x200 that I just posted.

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jffe wrote: probably wasting any time spent

I think it's too soon to tell but I do know FF sets the bar high with the environments they provide.

Take note that "rules" I mentioned in my previous posting are of purely technical origin and do not attempt to justify the aesthetical quality and applicability aspects of a certain lighting environment; I'll leave these to people that are more artistic than a geek like me (yes, I'm talking about you, people)

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Rule #1 -- since the image you're trying to fake is a latitude-longitude map of a sphere, you should make the image symmetric against the middle axis. Imagine that left half (of the image having the 2:1 aspect ratio) is a front part of a metal ball, while the right part is a back one. Blindly stretching image to 2:1 aspect ratio will not improve quality -- you can load it as it is to get almost same results.

this is good to know, also. i wonder then, if kaleidoscope images wouldnt make for good LE's? perhaps with a bit of histogram adjustment... ?

ok, thanks, onyx. what about other file types and just changing the file extension? i've been using only .jpg's so far and they work fine, but was just wondering if i had to convert other types to .jpg's first.

and here's how that looks once rendered:

I guess it depends on a lot of factors, I went back and tried out a couple I had made, and they looked o.k. on some stuff, they just didn't really work overall like the built-in FF ones do. I really don't see spending/wasting a bunch of time on ones that are worse than the FF ones. At least not when you can buy some professional ones for under $100. That said, if there is a way to make a normal low-fi picture into a good HDRI lighting file, I would be 110% interested, I am just not seeing it, and I don't see how we can add a dynamic range that isn't just inherently there to begin with. Oh, and for the record, the ones I made that even work a little bit, were made with FF, entirely in FF, using FF's lighting, so that's almost cheating like that ha-ha.

jffe

You can use any file format that Filter Forge supports in "File->Open Image..." dialog.