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Skylum Aurora 2019
- Thread starter furq
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I'm just downloading it now:
https://skylum.com/aurorahdr
I already have Easy HDR 3 which gives great results and less than 1/2 the price of Aurora HDR so Aurora HDR will have to be spectacular for me to consider purchasing it.
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https://skylum.com/aurorahdr
I already have Easy HDR 3 which gives great results and less than 1/2 the price of Aurora HDR so Aurora HDR will have to be spectacular for me to consider purchasing it.
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- Edit My Images
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I tried out Aurora HDR 2019 yesterday in a quick and dirty test on a few images.
At first glance it is an impressive program with a huge number of sliders and presets.
Without going into very deeply I can say that it has a really impressive ability to restore details where detail might usually be considered lost and also to restore shadow detail in a very awkward image which I tried.
BUT - it couldn't cope with some images, not just doing a poor job but doing NO job, instead returning a completely BLACK image!
The images were a horse show I did a few years ago in Ireland where I inadvertently underexposed them by 1 stop at 3200 ISO resulting in a lot of noise.
However I was able to recover them in Neat Image and Easy HDR 2 to give reasonable images.
But Aurora HDR 2019 seemed to be completely stymied by them.
I have sent an E-mail to Skylum and a copy of one of the images so am waiting to hear back from them.
It's a pity this problem occurred because it did seem to be an exceptionally promising program.
But at £92 I didn't expect any problems like this.
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At first glance it is an impressive program with a huge number of sliders and presets.
Without going into very deeply I can say that it has a really impressive ability to restore details where detail might usually be considered lost and also to restore shadow detail in a very awkward image which I tried.
BUT - it couldn't cope with some images, not just doing a poor job but doing NO job, instead returning a completely BLACK image!
The images were a horse show I did a few years ago in Ireland where I inadvertently underexposed them by 1 stop at 3200 ISO resulting in a lot of noise.
However I was able to recover them in Neat Image and Easy HDR 2 to give reasonable images.
But Aurora HDR 2019 seemed to be completely stymied by them.
I have sent an E-mail to Skylum and a copy of one of the images so am waiting to hear back from them.
It's a pity this problem occurred because it did seem to be an exceptionally promising program.
But at £92 I didn't expect any problems like this.
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- Edit My Images
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It looks like the problem with a lot of the pics I tried out is that Aurora HDR 2019 is assessing the EV at an impossibly high figure of 4000+.
Not quite sure why it would do this but if I put them through my editing program without actually doing anything then Aurora works properly on them.
However a second problem then reared its head when I put through an upscaled image at 65MP and Aurora simply crashed.
This happened a couple of times when trying other images - not even images as big.
Since Easy HDR 3 actually processed a 256MP image - and saved it - without a hitch I can't see me changing my HDR program to this, even with a huge discount.
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Not quite sure why it would do this but if I put them through my editing program without actually doing anything then Aurora works properly on them.
However a second problem then reared its head when I put through an upscaled image at 65MP and Aurora simply crashed.
This happened a couple of times when trying other images - not even images as big.
Since Easy HDR 3 actually processed a 256MP image - and saved it - without a hitch I can't see me changing my HDR program to this, even with a huge discount.
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- Name
- Russell
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I upgraded from the 2018 version to 2019 (It was cheap to do so
) I must admit that I use SNS-HDR more and never really found anything else out there to give a natural looking image right out of the box although a touch of contrast I found was needed on the images. After giving the Aurora 2019 a few test shots it is giving up IMO natural looking images without any additional tampering however it does seem to be for a (as Skylum put it) 'State-of-the-Art HDR' slow to render images, the batch process I found very slow, my computer is not super fast (Windows 10, 64 bit, 1050 Ti card, 16GB mem) but I expected this software to be a bit more speedier (for want of a better word), When using SNS-HDR for images with movment in them I found that not to be as good as the ghosting option in Photomatix so I would use Photomatix to create a .exr file and put that through SNS-HDR, Skylum promised an upgrade to the 2018 version to give additional image formats but that has not happened in the 2018 or now even in the 2019 version. By no means a pro photographer but have I hope included a couple images below of 5 images sets batch processed with Aurora with NO adjustments at all apart from RAW to Jpeg to post here.
Russ.
) I must admit that I use SNS-HDR more and never really found anything else out there to give a natural looking image right out of the box although a touch of contrast I found was needed on the images. After giving the Aurora 2019 a few test shots it is giving up IMO natural looking images without any additional tampering however it does seem to be for a (as Skylum put it) 'State-of-the-Art HDR' slow to render images, the batch process I found very slow, my computer is not super fast (Windows 10, 64 bit, 1050 Ti card, 16GB mem) but I expected this software to be a bit more speedier (for want of a better word), When using SNS-HDR for images with movment in them I found that not to be as good as the ghosting option in Photomatix so I would use Photomatix to create a .exr file and put that through SNS-HDR, Skylum promised an upgrade to the 2018 version to give additional image formats but that has not happened in the 2018 or now even in the 2019 version. By no means a pro photographer but have I hope included a couple images below of 5 images sets batch processed with Aurora with NO adjustments at all apart from RAW to Jpeg to post here.Russ.
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Well I use both Neat Image 8 for noise reduction and Easy HDR 3 for my HDR and I find these days many programs do tend to be slow because the processing is so intensive.
For Photos and video editing I have a Z600 workstation with 2 Xeon 5660 processors and 48GB RAM, but this isn't a super fast machine
Neat Image 8 is fairly slow on it compared to the previous edition of Neat Image I used but is definitely better at reducing noise without destroying fine detail.
However when I'm batch process ing I don't worry too much how long it takes - I can easily load a 1000 photos into it and let it run while I do something else - or go to bed.
I also do this with AI Gigapixel and just let it run.
The thing I did like about Aurora HDR 2019 is the ability to bring out fine detail in an image which was quite impressive on the samples I tried.
One was a photo of a young white duckling on water with a lot of detail missing due to highlights being almost burned out - and it recovered virtually all the detail - extremely impressive given that the photo was JPEG.
And the huge number of sliders does mean that the range of adjustments is incredible so it's a pity I found the problems I did.
EDIT you certainly can't tell that these images are HDR but I think that you could have got the same results with a single image, apart from the noise problem which using multiple images does tend to mitigate.
Which is why I put my photos through Neat Image 8 before I use my HDR program.
I use my HDR programs on single images because it's like using multiple layers in an ordinary editing program without the complication.
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For Photos and video editing I have a Z600 workstation with 2 Xeon 5660 processors and 48GB RAM, but this isn't a super fast machine
Neat Image 8 is fairly slow on it compared to the previous edition of Neat Image I used but is definitely better at reducing noise without destroying fine detail.
However when I'm batch process ing I don't worry too much how long it takes - I can easily load a 1000 photos into it and let it run while I do something else - or go to bed.
I also do this with AI Gigapixel and just let it run.
The thing I did like about Aurora HDR 2019 is the ability to bring out fine detail in an image which was quite impressive on the samples I tried.
One was a photo of a young white duckling on water with a lot of detail missing due to highlights being almost burned out - and it recovered virtually all the detail - extremely impressive given that the photo was JPEG.
And the huge number of sliders does mean that the range of adjustments is incredible so it's a pity I found the problems I did.
EDIT you certainly can't tell that these images are HDR but I think that you could have got the same results with a single image, apart from the noise problem which using multiple images does tend to mitigate.
Which is why I put my photos through Neat Image 8 before I use my HDR program.
I use my HDR programs on single images because it's like using multiple layers in an ordinary editing program without the complication.
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