How to remove highlights
There is a good effective way to remove highlights that appear in the window, on brightly lit surfaces. Corona renderer has a Highlight compression function. If you increase the value, the highlighting will be removed, but all the brightness of the picture will be gone at the same time. You can also increase the Contrast, but then you may get over highlighting again.
Highlight compression can not work when the picture is heavily overexposed: even when you raise the value to ten, highlights do not go, and making it higher than 10 makes no sense - the effect works fine when the value does not exceed 10.
Let's set it to 1 or 2 in order to preserve the brightness of the picture as a whole, let the window and the bright spots on the floor be overexposed. With such a light copy the picture of this renderer and paste it into Photoshop.
Now we lower the exposure of the renderer, slightly increase the compression and further decrease the exposure until the highlights on our picture disappear. Now we copy and paste it into Photoshop. Now we have two images with two exposure options: when we have no highlights and when we have highlights but everything is well lit.
To pick out areas that are too light, we need masks. Let's make a copy of the render in CMasking_WireColor or CMasking_ID mode , Render Setup - Render Elements - Add- CMasking_WireColor.
Create a black mask on the layer, it's now invisible. Let's select the tulle, where the biggest shadow is. Take a soft brush with about 20% transparency and slowly reveal the layer on the window, and then select the floor and remove the highlighting.
That way we can easily remove the highlights in the rendering process in post-processing in Photoshop, by preparing an auxiliary frame with exposure compensation.
We can also make the shadows richer by softening, emphasizing and highlighting in the right places.
Another tip is to always make three copies of your renders in post-processing with different exposures: normal exposure, which you are happy with, then underexposed when there is no glare in your picture, and overexposed.
That way you can fine tune the final image by brightening or darkening some areas, making it more contrasty, vibrant and vivid. Achieve the same effect in 3D Max is more difficult. So you can just raise the Highlight compression at optimal value to reduce the glare, save the picture, and then work in Photoshop, brightening and darkening the image areas where necessary.
Have a good rendering!
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