Teacup and Spoon in 720p

Recently I revisted one of my first carefully crafted renders, to re-render it in higher resolution and with less noise. I also wanted to save a high dynamic range OpenEXR version of it, because I hadn't yet implemented OpenEXR export when I made the original render. Some differences in my renderer subtley change the look of the scene, and I also tweaked the focus and depth of field, but for the most part it's just a higher quality version of the same render. No particularly new technology; just eye candy (which I hope to provide more of in the near future). Hope you like it.

My new 720p Teacup and Spoon render. Click for full size!

That image is the unmodified PNG that popped out of my renderer, but having the OpenEXR version (or any HDR or RAW format for that matter) would allow me to edit the image in the future without losing appreciable quality. I could even change the exposure. To illustrate this point, here are the EXR version and the LDR version, each with their exposures lowered two stops in Photoshop:

HDR OpenEXR version with exposure lowered two stops.

LDR PNG version with exposure lowered two stops.

Notice that the highlights (notably the ones at bottom left corner of the spoon) that were clipped in the original LDR version (at the top of the post) have now lost all detail in the adjusted version. But in the HDR version, new detail has been revealed.