The picture would help. The reality of forging or press forming an open part can be pretty complicated. Openings pre-cut in a blank may not wind up where you expect them when the die closes. You can do a lot with a simple die. We do all sort of odd stuff using waterjet cut blanks and improvised dies, using a press brake or hydraulic press depending on the situation.
The hard part with dies is where the die actually cuts the material, whether it's blanking from a larger sheet or trimming a part as part of or after forming. You can get pretty far with simple tooling if all you need to do is form the blank, not shear or remove material.
The tonnage can be low if air forming, i.e. the die only makes contact in specific areas, and the natural inside & outside radii formed between the contact areas are consistent with the material properties and your design requirements.
If your intent is for 100% of the surface area of the part to contact the die surface and take on its exact shape, that's a different situation, much more of an engineering project, with precision tooling in hard material, and far higher tonnage.
In between those extremes, there's also a lot you can do with a stripper incorporated into a die, not sure if that's the proper term here, I'm referring to a separate initial action that clamps the perimeter of the blank so that it stays put and is not drawn into the die.
Forming flanges in or around a part, e.g. a lid, or a cup, there's a point where it becomes a drawing operation, again more of an engineering project.
The point of my reply here is the ordinary industry way to stamp, form or forge a part involves a precision die set and precision machined tooling, esp. if the intent is making thousands or millions of a part. There's plenty of books that go into great detail about the sub processes - stamping, drawing, forging etc. How your part determines what processes are required and how the choice of process influences the detailed design of your part - most likely the part, process and tooling all designed together.
But for an R&D project where the objective is to proof a design, or you only need to make 1 or 100 of something, you can be as clever as you want using improvised methods that don't appear in books, at least not books I've seen, and I've read a lot of books on this subject. I've made forming dies constructed of nothing but stacked up waterjet parts, maybe some TIG, hand filing, a machined profile here or there, and occasionally urethane die springs to add a stripper action in an otherwise single-acting press.
We also waterjet cut part blanks for another business that makes more traditional production tooling, specifically press forming pre-cut blanks, where the net shape of the blank is dialed in to where they can skip trimming the finished part. That works for certain part geometries.
Much of that prototype work gets done in a 100 ton H frame shop press, with or without a die set, depending on the need for alignment. The production work then gets done elsewhere using traditional double acting hydraulic or mechanical stamping presses.