Blending an original image - Aurora HDR Tutorial

- While the benefits of an HDR image are fantastic sometimes you actually want to go back to one of the original images. Maybe it's one of the source layers and you want to layer that back in for a more natural sky or to bring back certain details that were lost. Aurora gives you the ability to add this layer back in quite easily but if you've taken advantage of some of the other options that we've applied here like lens correction and perspective you're going to have to do a little bit of work to sync things up. What I'm going to do is click on the plus button here and choose to add a new original image layer. This will put the original photo in. You can also add a new original layer or choose from one of the bracket layers. This allows you to go in for example and choose one of the underexposed images to better show the sky. You'll see that it's added to the stack. However if I toggle that on and off you'll notice that it's not working very well because of the significant transformations we've applied. So what's needed is to make a temporary preset. Click on the image that you've already adjusted here and at the bottom you're going to chose to make a preset. What we need to do is bring our our preset controls and I'm going to save an overall filter preset here. Let's switch to the user category so I can see this and I'll click save filters preset. To make this easier to find I'll place an underscore at the front and I'm going to name it STX for St. Croix INTERIOR. This is just a temporary preset that I'll likely delete later. When I click create new preset you'll see that it's added automatically to the list. Now what we need to do is choose the top layer and apply that preset. And what that is going to do is make it so that it is in the right angle. That's quite useful here but we need to remove a few things. For example on that new overlay layer I don't need any of my HDR controls. Or if I did I could adjust those separately. But perhaps all I really want here is that the windows are as is. And I'll even remove the vignette. So now that just gives me nice control over the windows. Then for example I can click on the paintbrush here and choose brush. Now using paint what we're going to do is just paint the windows in. You can actually take a look at the mask here to see it and we can even start to reveal things. So for example what I'm going to do is tell this to be inverted and now I'll paint back in those areas. What's happening here is I'm just brushing back in the windows. There we go. And I'll do a little bit here on this one. And you can adjust the size and softness of the brush to taste. Now let's turn that layer off or at lest the layer mask off. And what you'll notice here is that I brushed in the exterior. Just the windows and some of the light coming through have been replaced with one specific bracket. This ability to add the original layer or one of the brackets is quite useful particularly as you add masks. You might paint in the window or layer in the sky and then take advantage of something like a gradient mask so you can easily blend that back in. In any case using different source layers gives you precise control and allows you to selectively restore key details. Let's do that once more. This time I'm going to add one more bracket layer and it's going to be a brighter one. There we go. And it's added to the stack. Let's apply that same preset but turn off all the other adjustments. There we go. And what I'm going to do is apply a mask. We'll go with the radial mask and simply reveal this little part. Now if I look at that I see that the mask is exactly opposite. So I'm going to click invert. There we go. And now if we turn that mask off you 'll see that the brighter shirt is brought in. Now I probably don't want that much but that's why there's an opacity slider. I can now just layer that in at a very slight value and you notice that that let me bring that one shirt out by targeting this as an overlay. Now I can precisely bring that in just a little bit brightening up just that specific area with the mask. There it is. Let's go ahead and hide that. And you see that that's super useful because you can dial in exposures from different parts of the photo as you want. Now that was a good example but I don't actually mind that shirt being a little bit darker. So let's click the minus key here and get rid of that one layer. But in any case the ability you have here to add additional original image layers or bracket layers is quite useful. Just be sure to make a temporary preset. When you're done with that preset you can click here and choose to delete it and it will remove that preset. However you'll notice that the individual layers that you've already applied it to will still hold the proper adjustments. Now I can hide this and we'll move on to the next step.