I like many others have been eagerly awaiting the release of the Aurora HDR software which is produced by Macphun in collaboration with Trey Ratcliff, this is the same company who have produced the easy to use Luminar Windows Beta software. Both programs have a very easy to use interface which consists of ‘ready to go' presets which you can click and apply or the manual controls for more granular control over the output.

To do a demo, I  used a landscape photo I took at the il Tartufo restaurant near Arrowtown, NZ during a work trip. The photo is two stitched images which were stitched in Lightroom and had some very minor editing conducted to the image.  The image was duplicated and edited in Aurora HDR 2018 (Affiliate Link) where I picked the “Landscape Enhanced Preset” but made no other changes.

I did not adjust the strength of any of the presets, so this is out of the box but if you ask me I think it does a great job of bringing out some of the colours out of a single exposure image.

[twenty20 img1="6951" img2="6949" direction="horizontal" offset="0.5" align="left" width="100%"]