Creating high-quality and technically precise visualization is a challenge that everyone encounters, regardless of the industry. Modeling, lighting, materials, rendering process, and post-production are the five most important stages of the 3D visualization creation process. Every stage of this process is critical when creating visualizations, but Lighting, however, is the most essential one and has the largest impact on the final image.
Lighting is not only the most important stage but also the most problematic, and in most cases due to wrong lighting workflow, the final render doesn't appear as you or your clients expected: visualization can be too bright, too dark, materials, even of excellent quality, can appear odd, and there can be shadows and reflections that create unrealistic feeling.
When the final render does not meet expectations, most professionals are unsure where the problem lies, so they take the "easy" path and begin to follow the incorrect workflow: blaming solely on lighting sources, visualizers begin to experiment with them by adding too many additional and sometimes unnecessary sources, moving sources from place to place, rendering the image, evaluating the result, and repeating this process until the render meets their needs.
On the one hand, lighting source management and effective usage can be one of the reasons why the final render does not look the way you or your client intended is a lack of. Every professional must understand how illumination sources functions work, what their primary roles are, and which source is suitable in different cases. However, 3D visualization lighting requires much more than just lighting sources, and there may be technical issues that prevent you from achieving the desired result.
White balance, on the other hand, could be other reason of the desired outcome not being obtained. White balance helps to eliminate unnatural colors from the surface covered with white materials, but most professionals do not use this function, which is why, even when the proper lighting sources are used, the materials in the scene might seem different than intended.
Furthermore, color temperature might just be the reason of the final render appearing too cold or too warm, and due to this the atmosphere and mood of the final render are impacted. Not everyone is aware that the temperature of the light color could be modified and adjusted as desired before the rendering process and in some cases, depending on what render engine is used, the temperature can be changed after the rendering process, without rerendering the image.
