HDR Light Studio has been designed to quickly and efficiently handle working with many high resolution images loaded into your lighting project.
The following is a list of supported image file formats: BMP, DDS, DPX, FITS, HDR, ICO, IFF, JPEG, OpenEXR, PNG, RLA, SGI, TIFF.
HDR Light Studio works best when loading tiled and mip-mapped images. The image cache system then retrieves only the area of the image (the tiles) and the resolution (the mip-map level) required. This is all handled automatically for you and saves a huge amount of memory, which speeds things up considerably.
However, if you load large images that are not tiled and mip-mapped, then HDR Light Studio will load the full resolution images into memory. The performance will then be much slower!
Image Conversion
HDR Light Studio makes it easy to convert the images you load into tiled and mip-mapped images. When loading any image into HDR Light Studio that is larger than 1,500 pixels wide, you will be prompted to convert the image with the Image Conversion dialog.
Press the Convert button. (If you press Open Anyway the performance will be slow, and loading very large images will take a long time)
HDR Light Studio will then prompt the user to save a new image file that is tiled and mip-mapped and has the same file name with a .tx added.
Press Save and the image is then converted and saved onto disc.
The new .tx file is then loaded into HDR Light Studio.
Once images are tiled and mip-mapped like this, you can lots of load massive images into HDR Light Studio and it will perform quickly.
Missing Images
If a HDR Light Studio project is opened and a referenced image cannot be found, the light will be displayed as solid bright red. To fix missing images please see: Project Assets Dialog
