It seems to me that Aurora is meant to be a one stop solution that frees you from using a bunch of apps or plugins, but for me the most basic natural settings could not match the grace with which SNS-HDR handles lighting challenges, and I was confident that I could easily use other plugins and apps to pump up the hype, should I want to do so, ![]() Admittedly it does have dozens of parameters which you can use to hype up your image and turn it into some sort of spectacle. The Skylum website talks a big talk, and goes so far as to explain why it is much better than SNS-HDR, but what I found is that the basic HDR merge and tone mapping was cruder than SNS-HDR, and it had few useful controls for improving on the basic result. It provided the most natural looking output, and has the most detailed set of controls should you need to work through a challenge. I am left with opinion that SNS-HDR is the most effective of the three mentioned here. Today I tested SNS-HDR, Skylum Aurora, and Affinity Photo for suitability with an emphasis on getting the most natural yet effective results on wide range subject matter. I have a current project that requires HDR and was surprised to see that my last inquiry about state of the art Tone Mapping software was one year ago. His over-the-top cartoonish HDR ship sailed a long time ago. If you are interested in the application, download a trial and try to ignore the Trey Ratcliff hyper-promotional videos. Hopefully they will improve the ability for their application to accept and integrate a standard HDR workflow and also improve their batch processing. ![]() I have contacted their support a few times over the last year or two to suggest adding features and improving their toning, etc., and providing test image sets that demonstrate errors and artifacts and they usually respond, even though it is a somewhat generic response. That includes alignment and deghosting, merge algorithm and toning. If you use it for HDR imaging, then you are bound and wed to it to the point of producing toned, LDR output. You can only output an LDR image for each sequence that has been toned with a single preset. That is, if you have a batch of exposure sequences for HDR merging and you want to have Aurora segment each set, merge them and output a floating point, 32-bit per channel file for each merge operation, you cannot. The workflow that it supports is severely lacking though - it cannot read or write any standard HDR formats (Radiance, EXR, TIFF) and the batch processing feature does not even write their own proprietary ".mpaur2" file format (which presumably stores the HDR result of a merge). ![]() I haven't tried SNS-HDR yet.Īurora has come a long way since it was first introduced, and it can produce some high-quality images. Both programs have demos although Skylum doesn't make it easy to find them. I don't think it is there yet (especially on the PC) but if you use it as a plug in to Lightroom I think it is well worth the $59 you can usually buy it for. Luminar, in particular, is aiming to be a full featured image processing program. You have to be careful not to get heavy handed and go overboard on the whole HDR look but using the features judiciously can add a lot of value to your image processing. I use the programs on Windows and they are still incomplete for that platform versus the Mac versions but I've achieved some really remarkable photos that I couldn't with Photomatix, HDR EFex Pro or Merge to HDR in Lightroom. Luminar doesn't have the photo merge functionality but it incorporates most/all of the other features of Aurora plus a whole lot of other features. ![]() Aurora is explicitly for merging HDR photos although it can also operate on a single image. It looks like this thread is pretty much dead but I wanted to suggest looking at both Aurora HDR and Luminar 2018 from Skylum.
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