From the course: Learning Aurora HDR 2018

Using Aurora HDR as a Photoshop plugin - Aurora HDR Tutorial

From the course: Learning Aurora HDR 2018

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Using Aurora HDR as a Photoshop plugin

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- Aurora HDR can also be used as a plugin. I'm going to show you how to use it as a plugin inside of Adobe Photoshop as well as inside of Photos for Mac, but if you use the company's Luminar software, you can actually use Aurora HDR as a plugin inside of there as well. Before you can use Aurora HDR as a plugin in Photoshop, you'll need to make sure that it's installed first. Launch the application, and then on a Mac choose Aurora HDR install plugins. On a PC choose File, Install Plugins. Follow the instructions in the new dialogue box. If you've already installed the plugins once they should be available in all host applications. Periodically you may also be prompted to update the plugins after updating the application itself. Let's start by opening up this raw file, and I'll send that over to Photoshop. If you open up a raw file, you can do any processing that you want, but my personal suggestion is keep it simple. Feel free to remove chromatic aberration and apply a lens profile if your lens supports it, and you might want to take advantage of minimum sharpening. I'll boost that up a little bit, and then hold down the option or alt key to adjust my mask to refine the edges of the sharpening. Before you open this, make sure you click on the workflow option here, and choose to Open as a Photoshop Smart Object. This way, when you click Open Object, the Photoshop layer will contain all of the raw details. In the future you can just double click and jump right back into the raw file if you need to refine it. Additionally, this supports that you can apply this as a smart filter. So if I come here, and I choose to run Aurora HDR, you'll see that it applies the plugin. What happens is Aurora HDR launches, and you have the same options of opening up a single image. I'll choose the Tone Mapping option here, and if I need it I can choose chromatic aberration. But because the raw file has already been opened by Photoshop, the color denoise option is not available. I'll choose to create an HDR image. And it does the basic processing. Now it evaluates the shadows and the highlights, and a new image is created. If we take a look at the before and after, you'll see that even the basic HDR tone mapping did a nice job of rescuing some of the details in the shadows and the highlights. Now let's apply a very subtle change. I'm going to come here into the realistic HDR category, and take advantage of a simple one here called Realistic and Balanced. I like that. Let's close the preset. I'll zoom into 100% so I can better see some of the details. That looks good. Nice and sharp. And before I send it back, all I'm going to take advantage of is a little bit more HDR Enhance, and because this is a little bit noisy, we'll come down here to denoise and bump that up. Sometimes HDR can add noise into an image ever so slightly. Now we're zoomed in to 200%, let's go back out to 100. Looks great. Don't see any noise problems. If we look at the before and after you see that the Aurora plugin does a great job at bringing out color and depth. Let's click apply. And the image is processed and returned to Adobe Photoshop. You see it updates. And there is the new image. This is a smart object, so you can easily turn that on and off if needed. But doing so will actually take you back into Aurora and shows you the image where it last left it. So this is also possible if you double click on the filter to edit it. Let's click apply and it returns. So in the future if needed, you can double click or toggle the visibility, if you want to edit that plugin. What's nice here is the flexibility. So we can continue to add other plugins here in Photoshop. For example, maybe under the Sharpen gallery here, I'll choose Shake Reduction. This is because the iguana here was sitting on a moving branch and was kind of heavy and it swayed ever so slightly. That looks pretty good. Let's click okay. And we get a little bit of sharpening to the image. And I really like where that's gone. Let's go ahead and take a simple look here. I'm going to call up the history panel for a second and tell it to make a new snapshot. There we go. So we have our images here. Here's our original and here's our refined version. And it still looks incredibly photorealistic. Now that's the workflow using Adobe Photoshop. Let's switch over to Photos for Mac.

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