And you can go even further than that with the upright correction tab next to it, that allows you to change perspective and straighten lines, ideal for landscapes and architecture shots made with wide angle lenses that tend to bow lines outwards. Linked to that, there is now also a separate lens correction tab where you can remove wide angle distortion and CA. Secondly, the RAW processing engine also got a haul over, and I now see no difference when developing in, say, DXO Optics Pro or directly importing a stack of images in Aurora. Whilst I was at times hesitant of making HDR’s in Aurora before because I don’t like that over processed look, it’s now way easier to get realistic and delicate looking results. These might not look that impressive on paper but they’re all very useful for your workflow and will allow you to do every type of edit inside Aurora instead of doing extra edits in Photoshop.įirstly, the tone mapping engine is now faster and has been rewritten for more natural results. The Aurora 2018 release again brings some new and interesting features. There are also many presets included in the bundle for beginners, so you can quickly edit your images and find your own style. It’s also possible to denoise in the app itself, and then use layers to selectively denoise the sky for instance. An advanced masking system is also built-in, allowing you to adjust and process selected areas of your image differently. Macphun has also been at the forefront intelligent enhancements with their Luminar application, so many tasks are at least partially automated and easily controllable with the sliders. Whilst other HDR applications would, for instance, necessitate you to develop RAW files first in order to correct for lens distortion, Aurora has a built-in RAW engine that does this automatically for you. It’s updated regularly since the 2015 release and has continuously been updated with the latest advancements in HDR photography. It’s probably the most complete and easiest way to make both realistic or creative tone mapping HDR’s at this moment. This makes it slower (and more memory/system intensive) but leaves you with a much richer and eye pleasing image when correctly done. Local tone mapping requires the system to look up surrounding values for every pixel mapped. This allows each pixel of a given intensity will be mapped to a different value depending on whether it’s found in a dark or light area. Local Operators uses the location of the pixel in the image when analyzing the appropriate scaling for it. Using global only tends to leave you with a flat non-contrasty image after the conversion process. The process ignores its spatial location or if it’s in a dark or light area. Global operators map each pixel based on its intensity and global image characteristics. The algorithms that tone mapping use to scale the dynamic range down in an attempt to preserve the appearance of the original image captured by breaking the information up into two categories: global and local. The goal is to reproduce the appearance of images having a higher dynamic range to display properly on standard display devices. Tone mapping (what Aurora HDR is built on) actually uses the total tonal range (that is around 400 times larger than what your screen can reproduce) and will convert this in a 32 BIT environment to tonal values ranging from around 1 to 255. There are ways to counter this of course, but that is for another post. Getting back to those two techniques: luminosity masking basically cuts out the ideally exposed parts of those images and merges these together, but has the limitation of leaving you with a relatively flat or low contrast image. Maximum quality and flexibility for further manipulation are crucial. Modern sensors are often flexible enough to ‘push’ the darks and turn down the highs, but this often adds noise to those areas, and that is something modern HDR photography wants to avoid. These are then merged together to form a final image with a perfect (or at least better) perceived dynamic range. The starting point for both techniques is almost always a range of bracketed images, with each bracket aiming for a correct exposure of shadows, highlights, and in-betweens. Aurora HDR 2019 Demonstration + Review | 4K
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