However, Aurora HDR and Lightroom work together brilliantly to quickly and easily make a single exposure POP!
An actual HDR merge of bracketed photos with a product like ON1 HDR or ON1 Photo RAW would provide options to recover more highlight data.Most folks use Aurora to tone map/merge multiple exposures. HDR Look is a filter that works on the data in the given frame. Even with maximum compression, a spike of highlights remain at the right edge of the histogram. They are also not recoverable with the Compression slider. The blown out highlights of the sun pouring in through the skylight are obvious. The photo of the prison cell below was captured on an older Nikon camera that had good, but not great, dynamic range. Recall the Compression slider … even though it pulls in the deep shadows and bright highlights toward the center of the histogram, it cannot and does not fill in gaps in lost shadows or highlights. Where a proper HDR merge delivers more shadow and highlight data for post-processing, the HDR Look filter will not magically recover clipped highlights or shadows from a single exposure. It is not the same as blending bracketed photos. The HDR Look filter is just that – a look. The HDR Look Filter Is Not An Actual HDR Merge Likewise, the specialized Glow and Grunge filters have many more options than a single slider can offer. The Color Adjustment tool offers more control over independent colors channels. For these sliders, I will often turn to different tools in ON1 for more control. Vibrance increases or decreases color richness, Glow adds a diffused softness to darker areas of the photo, and Grunge adds a desaturated feel to a scene while also boosting detail. The individual Highlights and Shadows sliders give you independent control over these tonal regions. Compression affects both ends of the histogram, the brights and the darks at the same time. Highlights and shadows may need to be tweaked if the Compression slider in insufficient to get the look you want. You don’t have to reach for another tool. While ON1 Effects has other tools and filters that provide these functions, when only a small tweak is needed, their being in HDR Look speeds up workflow. Vibrance: Increase or decrease color richness in the photo. Shadows: Brighten or darken the shadows in the photo. Highlights: Brighten or darken the highlights in the photo. The remaining sliders in the HDR Look tool I classify as convenience sliders. Usually a moderate amount of Clarity is sufficient. Clarity is more aggressive, boosting local contrast and exaggerating tonal edges. Detail can actually be taken in the negative direction, although the results are quite unpleasing (at least to me) and not typical of an HDR styled photo. Detail is the tamer of the two sliders, and accentuates local texture. The two controls that deliver that are Detail and Clarity. The overall photo may take on a slight matte look as well.Ī main characteristic of HDR styled photos is a high amount of detail, bordering on a hyper-realistic amount of texture. Shadow areas are opened up and highlight areas are reigned in. The histogram is “compressed.” The resulting look delivers a similar appearance to a classic HDR merge. As the Compression slider is increased, the left and right edges of the histogram are contracted and move toward the midtones.
In the HDR Look filter, the Compression slider simulates this behavior, manipulating the histogram. The tones across the three brackets are compressed into the visual range of a single image. From the perspective of the normal exposure, the extra shadow and highlight data is pulled in from the over and under exposed images. You can think of the HDR merge process as overlaying all of those histograms into a single histogram.
From a histogram point of view, the underexposed photo is crowded toward the shadows on the left, the normal exposure is largely the midtones, and the overexposed frame has spikes on the right in the highlights. An underexposed photo to maintain highlight detail, a normal exposure, and an overexposed frame to reveal shadow detail. A bracketed set of three images is typical.
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Compression And The HDR LookĪ traditional HDR blend combines the shadow, midtone, and highlight details from a series of bracketed exposures into a single image. The type of detail and texture HDR Look delivers is different than other the ON1 filters like Dynamic Contrast. What it does offer is a way to add an HDR style to a single exposure. The filter is not the same as merging bracketed exposures in an application like ON1 HDR or ON1 Photo RAW. The HDR Look filter in ON1 Effects delivers tonal and detail controls often applied to HDR photos.
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