From the course: Learning Aurora HDR 2018

Removing ghost images with deghosting - Aurora HDR Tutorial

From the course: Learning Aurora HDR 2018

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Removing ghost images with deghosting

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- If you talk to a HDR photographer, you may hear them reference deghosting. Now this sounds like a strange term, but what it essentially means is removing a partial ghosted image. If you have a series of HDR photos and things are moving what happens is is that as the images combine there is a problem in that an object might appear in more than one place. So you end up with something that looks like a faded version that's partially see-through. This can be very problematic. But it's easy to fix. In this case, let's open up a series of images and you'll see the problem. Here, we have a boat. And the flag is going to blow in the wind. Let's go ahead and open up all of these. I'll choose the alignment option and take advantage of color denoise. But we will not worry about ghost reduction. I'll click create HDR. Now let's zoom in here. And pay particular attention to the American flag at the top of the ship. This is a classic example of needing deghosting. You can see that the flag was blowing in the wind. And between the different exposures, it occupied different spaces. Now other areas, such as these ropes on the boat, may also vibrate slightly in the wind. But it tends to be things like blowing branches. Blowing flags or moving crowds that cause a problem. Let's remerge this, with the ghost option selected. File, open, and we'll select all of the images, and choose open. And I'll choose the option here for ghost reduction. In this case it asks you which exposure do you want to use to remove the ghost? Typically, you're going to choose the base exposure. The one that's properly exposed. But if the ghosts are more in the shadows or the highlight, you might favor one or the other brackets. I'm going to go with the plus one option here. And I'll select the alignment. So from the pop up list, I choose which choice I want. In this case, image number two. And the strength. Since the flag is really blowing around in greatly different places, I'm going to choose a high amount of ghost reduction and I'll click create HDR. Now what happens is that the images merge together just like before. But then Aurora does an extra step. It takes that comparison layer and looks at the new HDR image. And anywhere where there's huge differences in details, it's going to apply subtle masking. And start to blend back to that good, single photo in that particular area. Now in this case, we have a great HDR image. And if we punch on in here to the top of that flag, you see that it's nice and tack sharp. In fact the ropes also look a little bit cleaner because some of that vibration caused by the wind, is now gone. Now we've got a nice, overall HDR image. Let's go ahead and apply a simple adjustment here. Using our basic category. I'm just going to do smart enhancer. And let's minimize those controls. Of course later on, we'll make adjustments to these controls but I really like that change. There's the single photo. Captured by the camera. And here's the simple HDR version. I love how the depth in the clouds and the sky and the water and the shadows and the highlights are all brought back. I would of course, refine this image ever so slightly. I feel like the color temperature needs to be just a little warmer and a tad brighter. In fact I'll take the eyedropper here and select something that I want to be a nice, neutral gray. That works quite well. That feels a bit better. We'll do a little bit of smart tone here. And a little additional recovery on the highlights. And then, down here under the polarizing filter. I'm going to adjust how much the skies are brought back. That looks good. And we'll apply a simple vignette at the bottom. There we go. Let's just adjust that. That looks nice. There's the side by side comparison and you see it's really a dramatic change. But fortunately that deghosting option still lets us take advantage of HDR, but remove the objects that are subtly or even dramatically moving in the scene.

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