From the course: Virtual Tours: Video, Photo, and VR

Merging an HDR image with Aurora HDR

From the course: Virtual Tours: Video, Photo, and VR

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Merging an HDR image with Aurora HDR

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- [Narrator] If you're looking for an additional tool to process HDR photos, one of my favorites is Aurora HDR from Skylum Software. It allows you to create enhanced detail in the dynamic range, and really bring details out in the photograph. Let's explore how we can open up three images captured on a consumer quality camera and get additional HDR detail that the built-in camera couldn't process. To start, let's prepare the images for HDR editing. I'm going to use the Insta360 Studio because I shot with an Insta360 camera. This step is optional, as I give you the files ready to merge already. Let's drag these in, and you'll see that they load. Now, what's important is to evaluate the settings. We're going to want to make sure we use the same settings on each of these images. In this case, I'm going to specify that I shot without a case. And, I'm not going to worry too much about other options here. But if I choose something like automatic horizon correction, that's fine, but I need to make sure it's done on each image. If you want, you can switch perspectives here to get a good idea of how things are working, but in this case, I don't think I actually want the automatic horizon correction. It looks better as is. All right, this seems good. We have our interactivity and it's working well. Let's go ahead and select all of our images here. We've got the three different states, and I'll choose my settings to export. I'm going to export these at the original size, not bother using any sort of states here, and then just target the location and click okay. Now, I'm going to skip this step because I've already exported the files. I just wanted to walk you through the process of preparing them in the software. Now, we can merge those. What you'll see here is we've got the three states: the base photo, the underexposed and the overexposed image. Everything is locked off and in good, stable shape with no shifting. I'll select those images and right click and choose to open these with Aurora HDR. Aurora HDR is stand-alone image editing software to create high-dynamic range images. It's made from Skylum. With my images selected here, everything looks good and I don't need to worry about alignment. And since there's no movement, I don't need to do any ghost reduction. I will take advantage, though, of chromatic aberration reduction for some of the areas with really high backlit contrast like windows or these lights. Now that I'm ready, I can click Create HDR. That looks good, and from the collections here, you'll see a wide range of presets. The architecture presets and these here from Randy are both designed for architecture type work. And you'll see a wide range here. For example, interior or tungsten lighting, daylight lighting, and just different types of effects. Or you can switch here and go to the architecture category and try something like balanced interior or detailed interior. It's really up to you. I like this balanced interior, but I am going to put just a touch of HDR clarity and put in little bit of boost to the details here. There we go. That's nice. There are lots of other controls, if you want to make color corrections or other choices, but this is looking good overall. I'll just put a little bit of a smart tone adjustment in here. And you see that allows us to make a nice, slow change to the middle exposure. That looks great, and I'm satisfied with that adjustment. Now, if I'd like, I can save this project so it's easy to come back to. File, Save As... Let's save this and capture a native file. You can overwrite the sample project that I provided if you'd like, or give it a new name. Now that the merging and color grading is done, I can also export a file. I'll just choose Export to image, and save out a high-quality JPEG file using the broader Adobe RGB color space or SRGB if I want to post directly to the web. This looks good, so I'll choose Save. Feel free to overwrite the sample file that I've included, and your JPEG is captured. Additionally, if you like, you can also send the image for additional editing inside of Luminar. Luminar is a companion application that is also from Skylum. It does include a tool for both erase and clone and stamp. This could be useful, for example, if you want to remove something in the image. Let's press the space bar to hold down and switch to the hand tool. And I will paint over the tripod stand here for the camera. Just indicate the area that I want to remove, and we can do the same up here. There we go. Click the erase button and the pixels are removed. We see it did a nice job. If you need to, you can paint a little bit more to further blend. That looks good. Let's go ahead and zoom back out. And looks good. We easily removed the light stand there. Don't see any other major problems, so I'll click Done. And it updates. And now, I'll just export that to an image again. We'll store this one in the same folder and click Save. And now it is ready for posting.

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