As part of my Jumping through the edits series I have been editing a macro jumping spider image using a few different photo editing tools to try and bring the best out of the image. In this article I focus on how I used Aurora HDR to improve the image and make it pop.

There are a number of different edits I have made to this Image up until this point, this has included focus Stacking, and Denoise to get to a good base image. Now I want to try and improve the overall quality of the image.

To try and make this Image pop a bit, I decided there would be value in putting it through Aurora HDR, this is a peice of software by Skylum which is known as a High Dynamic Range editor, it is designed to enhance your image by making adjustments to the colours, shadows and highlights.

I kept the edits fairly simple. I only really applied the base changes that Aurora HDR made, and then I also adjusted clarity, the polarisation filter, and some other very minor edits which lead to the image below.

As you can see, it has made a substantial difference to the macro image and has improved both the blue background, but also more importantly the colours of the spider as well as enhancing some of the detail.

It goes to show that, whilst HDR is traditionally considered for things like landscape images, there can be significant benefit in applying HDR to macro images as well to bring out some of the colours and improve the shadows and highlights to make the image pop.

If you are interested in Aurora HDR, you can find more information here.