if your goal is to make each pixel in your render look the best it can look, you should master lighting, am not just talking about watching hours and hours of tutorials on lighting in blender though that might help sometimes you just need the right tools for the job because lets face it, by now you already know enough about it all you need is to perfect implementation.

And these addons wont just help you light better they will help you do it easier and consistently be good at it.

Light Control

lighting does not get any easier than this, you can light your subject by clicking on the subject and a light will be added and pointed directly to the spot you clicked, making it easy for you to highlight different areas of your model, the addon also makes features like focusing and changing the angle of your light much easier by simplifying how you interact with your lights, you can scale the lights by draging them, change color, soften shadows all with a simple interface and pie menu.

Flares Wizard

Much like depth of field and chromatic aberration, lens flares are an authentic phenomenon in real-world photography. By simulating this effect in CG, you can enhance the authenticity of your renders. However, creating realistic lens flares in Blender is challenging without addons like flare wizards most artists usually add this as a post production effect in after effects or nuke which can cost hundreds of dollars in monthly subscriptions but with flare wizard you never have to go out of blender, its realtime and works in both cycles and eeve.

Leomoon Lightstudio

if your renders suck its not you, its the tools you are using, can you replicate this lighting in blender, if the answer is yes, then congratulations you are in the top 1% of artists who are really good at blender, but its still going to take you quite alot of time to setup, if you are not in the 1% you can easily replicate this lighting and more using the LeoMoon lightstudio, this addon is the best at creating product visualization, which heavily relies on reflections to capture beauty and form, since you rarely use enviroment HDRI for lighting and reflections, you have to use studio HDRi which sometimes don’t give you the lighting you want, this addon can be used to make perfect studio HDRI and you can select where you want reflections to be on your model.

Physical Starlight And Atmosphere

while leomoon creates hdri for interior lighting Physical starlight and atmosphere creates outdoor environments for outdoor lighting, think of it as an hdri generator that outputs a physical atmosphere that you can fly into, generates a physically accurate atmosphere, horizons, skies, stars and clouds, its directable, animatable just about everything you need to create realistic looking skys and atmospheres that produce perfect lighting and capable of simulating a day and night time cycle.

Better Lighting V2

lighting is not just about lighting, it can be used to convey mood, story and it can be fun, if you want lighting effects light caustics, colored shadows, club lighting and more, take a look at better lighting. this addon comes with a  rich collection of lighting presets to effortlessly create dynamic lighting effects
with just one light source all accessible in a convenient pie menu for easy operation.

Gobos Light Textures

Most artists already no the impotance on light gobos, and most already have a dedicated solution for producing gobos in blender, if you have not jumped onto the trend yet, take a look at this gobos light textures, its a Library of textures to generate ultra-realistic shadows in your scenes. including  14 categories with a total 149 textures! you will find static gobos and animated ones, these are not just simple textures, these are created with depth similar to height maps, so that your shadows dont look basic but detailed with depth

Hdri Maker

Did you know HDRIs can be more than backgrounds, do your models feel too small or too large in your HDRI, does it feel like they are floating instead of being firmly planted onto the ground of your hdri, those are the problems you get with simple hdris, they are merely jpeg images in the background and if you are using them like that, you are missing out on the potential of HDRIs, HDRI maker turns hdris from simple jpegs to actual enviroments that are part of your render instead of just backgrounds, you can drive on them, edit them, walk on them, cast shadows on them and more.

Pure-Sky Pro

sometimes the sky is not just a background effect in your render, sometimes its the focus of your render, the main character and even when its not wouldn’t you want it too look as good as the rest of your scene, animated with detail and depth, thats puresky for , it comes with a preset of different skies with different sky elements, like exponential height fog, god rays, clouds, stars, and my favourate hybrid mode, if you have an hdri background you like but want to add extra detail to it, this mode lets you layer pure sky pro elements like clouds, a sun, moon, and fog on top of your image to make your renders look more reacher.

Shaders Plus – Caustics, Thin Film

caustics are fun and satisfying to look at, what is not fun is rendering them, they are heavy and take too long to render, what is not heavy and renders in real time is shader plus caustics, they look realistic, colorful and customizable, Replicating how Shadow Caustics work, through a shader, to achieve Real-Time Caustics results within Cycles! Simply enable the shaders Caustics Strength slider, tweak the values to your desire, and voila!

In fact, these caustics actually tend to render faster than anything else in the scene! Even on the lowest end of hardware!