@williamatics My understanding is simplistic and maybe incomplete, but here’s what I know:
A light probe is like a 360-degree image that describes the lighting in a scene. Think of an HDRi – an HDRi contains two kinds of information, an actual photo image (which is what you see in the background and in the reflections of the objects in the scene) and lighting information, so that the 3D objects in the scene are lit (ostensibly) the same way as things in the photo image. The part of the HDRi that contains the lighting information is a “light probe”.
I think you can make or import or otherwise use a light probe in Blender without an entire HDRi image, but I don’t know how the particulars on how do that. I think light probes independent of HDRi are more often used for game environments like in Unity, rather than Blender still images or animations. But I could be wrong about that.
