It also means I can account for colour tints and shifts with old lenses, too. Support for the DCP files created with the X-Rite ColorChecker was recently added to Luminar 2018, and it’s meant that I can get much more accurate colours out of my cameras, and more consistency between cameras of different brands.
When it comes to colour, though, there is one feature missing that I wish they’d added, and that’s DNG Colour Profile support. Seeing this come to Aurora HDR is a very welcome addition. You can use them to achieve the same looks for your images in a number of applications, as well as for video footage in most popular video editors. Unlike app-specific presets, LUTs are fairly universal. When I do want to go with a “preset” of sorts, I use LUTs. Personally, I hide all the presets and prefer to tweak things myself manually.
The software comes loaded with a whole bunch of presets called “HDR Looks Collections”, if you’re into that kind of thing. But while you’re adjusting colours, shadows, highlights, etc. It is a little frustrating once you start moving those detail & clarity sliders, though, as you have to keep letting go to see what kind of effect your adjustment has had.
As soon as you let go of the mouse, the more detailed preview appears. The quality of the image drops slightly as you scrub the sliders to help speed up the previews, but for the most part, this isn’t a problem. Once actually inside the software, the sliders now react pretty much instantly. Aside from the resolution of the images, processing speed will also depend on how complex your scene is, the number of features it contains, how much ghosting may need to be cleaned up, various other factors and, of coruse, how fast your computer is.
The D800’s big 36MP files did take quite a while to process, although still more quickly than most of the other HDR software I’ve used over the years. The 24MP files from the D5300 came in a little slower, but not unreasonably so. The D300s files came in and were processed extremely quickly. I tried out some sets of RAW images from my old 12MP Nikon D300s, the 24MP Nikon D5300 and the 36MP Nikon D800. And throwing 9 images at Aurora HDR is quite quick, depending on the camera you’re using. For me, that typically means nine bracketed shots, each being one stop apart. Obviously, with multiple images, you’ll get more accurate results than with a single shot, but the AI engine seems to handle single shot tone mapping very well. Personally, I find that the single image tone mapping can be nice if you just want to add a nice little boost to the shadows or recover a little more detail from the highlights.īut using multiple files is where it really shines. Aurora HDR 2019 can create images maximising the dynamic range of the scene from either a single image or multiple images.