Changing HDRI exposure within Blender I've been looking for some HDRs to use in an animation, and I realize that they're going to be exceptionally expensive. 

This is why I'm wondering if I can change the exposure of an HDR from within Blender to get everything I can out of one HDR. The purpose of an HDR is to have a High Dynamic Range. This means I should be able to scale the exposure of the HDR and still have varying depths of light.

Here's a comparison between a jpeg(left) and an HDR(right) as an example of how HDRs have broader depths of light when the exposure is changed:


(Source: How to make your own HDRI)

Of course, this should already make sense if you're familiar with HDRs.

So I want to be able to use an HDR at multiple exposures. Is there any way I can change the exposure in Blender? I know there are some other programs that do that, but Blender should be able to do it.

Right now, I use the background node's "Strength" parameter to change the brightness, but that doesn't make the lighting of the objects in the scene darker or lighter respectively.
Given the answer of troy_s in this question here How to measure the dynamic range of an HDRi?, he states in the first paragraph that:


  An F-Stop is a halving and doubling of light, relative to the exposure
  referenced.


Now from my own trial and error testing in Blender, that's exactly what happens when you change the exposure value in Blenders color management settings:



If we now apply this thinking as a formula, for each color pixel this would mean to do the following for each color channel:

Pixel(x) = x * math.pow(exposure_value, 2)


Transferred into nodes, this could look like the following Node setup:



In a world node tree, you would now have something as easy as this if you transfer it into a node group:



You can find this node group, and also a similar one for the compositor to doodle around, in this Blend: