User:RentaCenta/hdr

3SIX0 is one of the world's largest royalty-free HDRI stock libraries, providing HDR environments, along with background photography or video footage. 3SIX0 has a team of experienced photographers who travel the world, using advanced digital imaging technology from Spheron VR in order to create the biggest and most varied stock library possible.

Overview
3SIX0 is distinguished within the industry by its use of a SpheroCamHDR® from Spheron GmbH® to take all of its HDRIs. Each HDRI therefore consists of 26 different exposures. This means that images have a far greater dynamic range than the majority of HDRIs created by other means, allowing greater realism in a rendered image.

Additionally, 3SIX0 possesses a very large library of HDRIs, with some of the most uique images available to users. They also off matching background plates and/or video footage to accompany most of their HDR images.

What is HDRI?
High dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.

High Dynamic Range Imaging was developed in the 1930s and 1940s by Charles Wyckoff. Wyckoff's detailed pictures of nuclear explosions appeared on the cover of Life magazine in the early 1940s. The process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range, was first reported in 1993, and resulted in a mathematical theory of differently exposed pictures of the same subject matter that was published in 1995. In 1997 this technique of combining several differently exposed images to produce a single HDR image was presented to the computer graphics community by Paul Debevec.

Information stored in high dynamic range images usually corresponds to the physical values of luminance or radiance that can be observed in the real world. This is different from traditional digital images, which represent colors that should appear on a monitor or a paper print. Therefore, HDR image formats are often called "scene-referred", in contrast to traditional digital images, which are "device-referred" or "output-referred".