HDR image-based lighting (HDRI) is a versatile alternative to the two Podium skies, providing a fast, easy way to light your exterior images in a wide range of lighting conditions.

When HDRI lighting is active, the chosen HDR becomes an all-in-one solution for the sky, background, and natural lighting in your render. This streamlines the exterior rendering workflow and provides several advantages:

• Realistic reflections due to 360° sky and background.
• Never have to worry about adding a background in post-processing; shadows, exposure, and tonal quality always match.
• Ability to quickly see your model in several lighting scenarios without any extra work. Switch from clear to cloudy, from morning, to afternoon, to sunset, simply by picking a different background.
• Easy solution for product/studio rendering.

Read more about HDRI lighting in Podium

The Podium Browser interface has been refreshed to make the process of searching through categories and subcategories faster. Click and drag sliders let you scan an entire category quickly, and new sorting options let users view up to a hundred thumbnails at once.

SU Podium V2.6 makes it much easier for users to take advantage of an .HDR rendering workflow. There are two changes that make this possible.

1. A set of .HDR presets are now included by default in the V2.6 installation. These presets provide a better base for rendering to the .HDR image format.
2. Podium Image Editor now fully supports editing of .HDR images, and includes a new one-click HDR tonemapping option called "Adaptive linear." This is a histogram normalization function designed to fix exposure problems without losing your highlights and shadows.
   By rendering to .HDR and selecting the adaptive tone map, a vastly underexposed render can easily be pulled into an acceptible luminance range while enhancing areas of local contrast. This provides a much better base for further post-processing and prevents the need to re-render an image that probably would not have been salvageable without the added robustness of the HDR format.

Two changes have been made to the list of included render presets:

1. Preview presets removed - The preview presets were taken out of the base Podium installation. Although they were fast, we feel that the "preview" presets were too inaccurate and problematic to be truely useful for preview rendering. Our recommendation is to create test images with the "default" presets, which produce a more accurate representation of the lighting and quality you can expect to see in a finished Podium image.
2. HDR presets added - The HDR presets are meant to be used any time you are rendering with HDR as the selected output format. The HDR presets create an image with no inherent tone-mapping applied, under the assumption that users will post-process their images in either PIE or a third party image editor with 32-bit support (Photoshop, Lightroom, et al.). Rendering to HDR is only recommended if you plan on post-processing your render.

Faster "Processing Scenes" - The Podium Exporter is now multi-threaded, meaning SU Podium V2.6 now uses all your CPU cores during the "Processing Scenes" stage of the render.

In past versions this was a single-core process, meaning a significant portion of your CPU resources were idle during this portion of the render.

While this will not speed up overall times dramatically, it does cut down the turnaround/iterative time for quick test renders, especially for large models with a lot of textures.

Podium will now remember specific render settings on a scene-by-scene basis within a single SketchUp model.

In the past, the Podium options dialog simply remembered the most recent settings for each parameter. This was problematic when batch-rendering several scenes in a complex SketchUp model, especially if the model contained a combination of interior and exterior scenes.

When creating a new SketchUp scene Podium now saves all your current render settings including preset, background, intensity/exposure, and every other parameter in the options dialog with that specific scene. This way when you switch between SketchUp scenes you won't have to re-configure your Podium settings after you've done it once.