This article explores the inner workings of HDR, what it’s for, and how you can implement it to improve the quality of your renderer.

Glow effects simulate the characteristics of a lens that suffers from light bleeding due to a high dynamic range. This article will go over the process of how to produce these auras as well as examine some techniques for blending the result.

When light bounces off a surface, it contributes to the amount of ambient lighting, or environment lighting we see. In a basic renderer, the amount of ambient lighting a surface receives is uniform, making it look rather flat. Ambient occlusion provides a more realistic shading technique by taking into account that nearby objects may occlude the amount of ambient light reaching a surface…

This article covers the mathematics behind the various blend modes such as screen blending, overlay blending, burn and dodge blending, etc. These blending operations are similar to what you use in image editors such as Photoshop and Gimp.