Aurora hdr pro for mac#
Aurora hdr pro pro#
Aurora hdr pro software#
Aurora hdr pro windows#

What I do want to avoid is hotspots that those lights project (like the spots where the light hits the walls and floor, for instance). In many cases, I will allow lights to slightly clip, hitting the right edge of the historgram because in reality, I’m not able to discern detail (like printing on the bulb for instance) so I feel those points fall outside of the perceptible range anyhow. With this shot, here’s what I started with.

Aurora hdr pro windows#

(If interested in how I measure and capture the dynamic range of a scene, you can see an earlier article I wrote HERE) From time to time, I’ll stretch that out to 7 or 8 shots, but that might be for a poorly lit basement with a couple south facing windows that provide a horribly balanced exposure, for instance. I find that in most situations, when shooting interiors, I rarely need more than 5 shots at single stop increments to capture the dynamic range in its entirety.

Aurora hdr pro software#

Also, modern software like this is pretty intuitive in that you can just start playing with sliders to see what looks good, and what may look good to me, may not to you, so the moral here is to have fun with it. That said, as opposed to the specific numbers or values, I’m looking at how a slider or group of tools will ultimately affect my pictures, and hopefully can help give insight into how that may translate to different shots, under different conditions. There’s no one button solution for me as my goal is to really bring out the dynamic range of a scene, not necessarily make an image that looks like an HDR image, if that makes sense. In my opinion, HDR is better as an exacto knife, rather than an ax, and should be used differently for each image, essentially. Instead of purely walking through this program, I’m going to share my experience as I’ve worked through, processing one of my shoots using the first image I processed. I’m going to take a slightly different tack on this review. Tick the applicable boxes and click “Create HDR”. You’ll be given the option to select Alignment, Ghost Reduction (I use my EV0 image as a reference by default) and Chromatic Aberration correction. All you need to do is open Aurora (or run it as a plugin from a host program like Aperture, Lightroom or Photoshop), navigate to and select the image(s) you’d like to work on.

You can use a single image, or a bracketed series.

Aurora hdr pro pro#

To start, if you’d like to work through this and follow along with me, you can download a free trial of Aurora HDR Pro from Macphun HERE. Well, I chose to process my most recent shoot using solely Aurora HDR Pro, and here’s what I found out about that program along the way… When shooting an interior space, I want to take advantage of the actual dynamic range, getting detail in the highlights and shadows when and where I feel necessary, not just tone mapping for a more dramatic effect.

My goal has always been a natural representation of light and space, which as many know, can be tricky when tonemapping images through an HDR program. Much of my actual paid photography work falls into the interior design and hospitality realm, working with that wonderful group of folks at the ELK Collective.

Aurora hdr pro for mac#

Over my personal journey with HDR, I’ve used quite a few programs (HDR Soft/Photomatix, Everimaging HDR, HDR Efex, Photoshop…) and when Macphun and Trey Ratcliff recently announced Aurora HDR for Mac users, I was very interested. Time is money, and the more I can save myself (and price my time to the client accordingly) the better off I’ll be. I’d like to say that clients will happily pay for 4 or 5 hours while you set up and shoot, but I’ve not found many that will A) have that much down time to shoot unless I want to shoot at 3 in the morning, which I totally don’t) or B) have the budget for, or see the value in a photographer that takes that long to shoot a space. I find the ability to bracket and merge in post a valuable tool when needing to be in and out of a space in a shorter amount of time (as opposed to setting up multiple lights for each and every shot which can limit the total amount of finished shots in the same time period). For the other stuff though, I do love me a nicely balanced, merged exposure and have for many, many years.

I too enjoy capturing and processing final images using single frames for 90%+ of my own photography.

If you’re not into it, I totally understand and respect that. While the practice of merging exposures is a topic of much debate, I don’t really care.