This video* describes a technique I developed some time ago to simulate studio photography.

* the video is more of a description than a full tutorial, it assumes a certain level of knwoledge of modo (or any other application that this technique may apply to). The audio was recorded on the internal MacBook Pro microphone, so the quality is rather low, plus I'm not used to speak alone in front of a computer...;-) Enjoy.

I have been using image-based lighting for a long time in my renderings, but since 2007 I found myself rendering a good number of real-world products. I started looking around for information on real world studio lighting and product photography because wanted to be able to model my lighting with greater precision.
The options I had were either based on B&W HDRIs, faked bounce cards, using CG lights and playing around with speculariry settings, and a couple more or less standard lighting rigs.

All of these methods presented some disadvantages for the type of result I was looking for; HDRI provides excellent lighting quality, but photo-based HDRIs have too much "character", both in terms of colour balance and overall effect on the rendered surfaces. B&W HDRIs are completely neutral colour-wise (...really? :-) but because of their bitmap nature they cripple the user when trying to control where a certain highlight should be cast.

Bouncecards are the closest thing to the way a real world studio setup works, but it's way too much fiddling around, trying to position them correctly around the model, plus each one requires its own texturing in order fade the opacity of the boucecard surface to avoid razor-sharp reflection edges on the model.

In the end I started imagining some way of dynamically creating HDRI-like environments on the fly.
I thought of using the painting tools that modo started to offer, to paint light areas on spherical environments, but the freehand brushes didn't work very well with my hand painting skills.
I needed something more illustrator-like, that is why I started playing around with UV ramps applied to the luminous channel of environment geometry.

Comments here or on Luxology's thread.