Occasional Allowance for Imperfect HDRIs

Occasionally I'll screw up shooting an HDRI in some way, whether it be missed focus, incorrect focal length, incomplete dynamic range or a dirty lens.

Often these HDRIs would otherwise be pretty sweet, but their irreparable flaw prevents me from publishing them on HDRI Haven without spoiling my efforts to maintain a high standard of quality.

The worst part is that the flaws of these HDRIs often make it significantly more difficult to stitch them - for example, out of focus images make it hard to add control points accurately, or an incorrect focal length might reduce the overlap between images meaning a smaller margin for control points and a high chance of visible seams. Thus I often spend more than the usual amount of time stitching these flawed HDRIs, trying my best to fix them, only to end up with something that isn't all that good.

Still, sometimes they might be useful to someone, it's always been impossible for me to predict which HDRIs will be popular, so I've tried to come up with a way to publish them anyway...

You might notice a new red flag at the top left of the HDRI I published today:

This will be a super rare flag that indicates the HDRI has some kind of flaw. If you hover over it, it'll tell you what the problem is:

In this case, the lens was super dirty, creating a lot of ugly blotches in the sky and also some visible seams from my attempts to hide the worst of the dirt and the lens flares.

Despite these issues, I think it's actually a pretty nice HDRI that may be of some use to you, as long as that ugly part of the sky is not too visible in the background or any reflections.

This HDRI and any future flawed HDRIs will not count towards my weekly HDRI schedule (two per week, or one with backplates), so you can rest easy that they won't prevent me from continuing to publish high quality content on a regular basis.

Once the next Patreon goal is reached to open-source the site and allow external HDRI contributions, this will also provide a means to publish other people's HDRIs submitted to me that aren't quite up to the standard I want, but are otherwise spectacular. This will of course be decided on a case-by-case basis, I don't want to flood the site with low quality work.