If we need to use a physically incorrect HDRI file, we can workaround its exposure directly within the world shader.

Not only that it provides realistic reflections for glossy materials, but also creates colored lights and shadows in the most realistic way since every pixel of the environment map actually stands for a light source illuminating the scene.

Thanks to that, they are capable to capture extremely high range of luminance.

I think, there is no camera capable to capture such dynamic range in a single shot.

All that difficulties are the reason why quality HDR images are quite rare and expansive.

However, there are many sites providing HDRIs for free, usually in reduced resolution.

Just make a World Material with Environment Texture and Background Shader.

If you want to rotate the environment, just add a Mapping node and you can rotate it around Z axis.

Just use the Is Camera Ray attribute and plug it into a Mix Shader.

The example below uses a spherical gradient as a background to create sort of vignette effect.

In this case we just need to create a new material for the plane according the node setup below (dont forget to set the same Z axis rotation in the world shader and plane material).

At least, I didnt find any free HDRI that wouldnt need any adjusting.

I used my custom Exposure node here and also a setup to match color temperature.

Yet the result is not what I would expect at direct sunlight, the mesh object is too dark and shadows are too subtle.

We need to be able to increase the exposure range, especially for the sun.

To do so, Ive developed a versatile node setup that enables not only to increase the sun exposure, but also tune the strength separately for all these parts: background, lighting, reflections.

The node can also correct the color temperature of the illuminating light, therefore the color fix is applied only for the lighting and reflection shaders, but not for the background shader.

Now it looks as expected for a direct sunlight scene Note that we didnt need to modify the actual HDRI file and we fixed it by world shader nodes.

Of course, you could use a photo editor (like Photoshop) which supports HDRI files.

But no need to use any expansive program, we can modify HDRI files directly in Blender.

Hint: you can select the default export file type in Properties - Output.

It enables to increase the sun exposure the same way as the HDRICorrect node for the World Shader.

The only thing Compositor misses, is the color temperature in Kelvins, so we need to provide color correction in RGB format.

Note the blur and vignette effect added later in compositor.

Blender Environment Texture