In this paper, an effective method for shape recovery using HDRI (high dynamic range images) is proposed. Firstly, an accurate reflectance map for a reference sphere relating its radiance values and corresponding normals is established, then the set of candidate normals of each target point comprising the same material are found by comparing its radiance to that of each reference sphere point. At last, a smoothness operation is applied to the normals to obtain a reasonable result, and the height values can be recovered. The experiment results show the performance of our approach.