Control brightness of map for environment dome (not light, not HDRI)

Diomede

Created a 360 degree environment map in another program.  It is not an HDRI and not intended to be the primary light in the scene.  I just want it to show behind my scene on the environment dome.  However, when I render the scene at default Iray, the environment map is too pale.

 

What can I do?  I have posted the 360 map and a test render to show the pale dome.

BeeMKay

Turn the dome to finite instead of infinite. If you apply the hdri on infinite dome, it will spread "infinately".

You currently just see the fog area above the mountains in very large. You might have to experiment with the dome size for proper display.

Fishtales

@Diomede

I find Studio does that with a lot of images that are put into the Dome as either a background or an HDRI. You can try lowering the Environment Intensity or the Environment Map intensity or both. Or take the image into PS or Gimp and darken it and see if that works, I've tried this and sometimes it works and more often it doesn't, it didn't with yours :) Or use it as a Background under the Environment Tab/Background as I did in this quick render.

Click on image for full size

 

Diomede

Thank you, BeeMKay and Fishtales.  

This is a result of using the background and reducing both the environment intensity and environment map to 50%.  Not perfect, but a definite improvement.

 

Diomede

and ths is reduced to 25.  So at least I have an idea now what affects it.