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- [Todd] Hi, this is Todd Olthoff and welcome
to another edition of ScreenCastsOnline.
This week we will take a look at a photo editing application
by Skylum Software called Aurora HDR 2019.
Skylum Software was formerly Macphun software,
the creators of many photo editing applications,
some of which we have covered here on ScreenCastsOnline
in the past.
This particular application has been developed
together with famed photographer Trey Ratcliff,
who is known for a particular style
of photography called HDR.
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range
and it is used to properly expose both the brightest
highlights and the darkest darks of a photo equally
to show the whole range of exposure in one photo.
This happens by taking multiple exposures
and blending them together into one image
that contains a blend of all of those exposures.
Aurora HDR 2019 does the work of blending
multiple photos with different exposures
into one photograph and then provides editing tools
to make that photo look the way you want.
So let's get started by taking a look at
HDR itself and talking about how to get everything
you need from your camera to get the most
out of Aurora HDR 2019.
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Before we start to use the application,
let's talk a little bit about what HDR is
and what problem it solves.
So if you've ever tried to take photographs
of things like, let's say landscapes,
one of the things that you'll notice is
it's very difficult to expose for a bright sky
and then have the landscape turn out correct,
or if you exposed for the landscape,
the sky doesn't work right.
So for instance, I've got some photos here,
let me just pull this one up here
and I'll just do Quick Look on it.
What will typically happen is you'll get
a shot like this, now this is a perfectly exposed shot
taken here of Mono Lake, and what you'll see
is I've got a dark foreground here
and then I've got highlights that are blown out in the sky.
You can see some of the details are there,
but the highlights are blown out,
so I lose some detail up here and I also am gonna lose
some detail in some of these shadows
because they go too dark and so
I'm gonna miss some things here.
Now, I can take this photo and work on it in Photoshop
or one of those applications and see what I can do
to enhance it.
It's gonna take some work, but it's difficult
'cause I'm gonna lose some things.
So let me just put this down.
So then what we tend to do is we tend to say,
okay, well then let me try to expose for, let's say the sky.
And so I'll say I wanted the sky to have more details.
So I go and expose for the sky and you can see
that okay, there's the details, I've got more colour now,
I have more highlights up here, you can actually see
the clouds and the definition.
You can see the mountains, but now all of the sudden
I've lost all this detail down here.
So now it's too dark and I can't see anything.
This would be very difficult to fix.
I wouldn't get very good results trying to work with this.
The sky would look great,
but everything else would be a mess.
So then our tendency is to say, well then let's expose
for the ground and so I expose for the foreground
and now you can see, look at all the details in here
that I was missing.
You can see the rocks and the stones in the water,
you can see how the water flows over here,
and now you see all the detail that was in that shadow
that I couldn't find in the other two photos.
But notice, my sky is completely white.
I've got nothing up here, no detail at all.
All the highlights are blown out.
So if I expose for the ground, I blow out the highlights,
if I expose for the sky, I blow out the dark areas.
And so that's what creates my problem.
With HDR, we take all three of these images
and we blend them together so that the best
of each image is present in one image that we can work with.
Down here you see that our cameras, like our iPhones,
they try to do the job for us,
and they do a better job, let's say,
than our regular DSLRs because they're using
some computational things to try to pull out
all the detail they can.
So here you see I've got more detail in the foreground,
this is taken with my iPhone.
And I've got some of the detail on the sky,
but you can see it still has a little bit of struggle.
You can see some of these details in here aren't as clear,
I've got some things blown out over here.
And so it's better, but it's still gonna take
a little bit of work to fix it.
So that's where a program like Aurora HDR comes into play
because it's gonna allow us to blend these things together.
So now that you've got an idea of what HDR is all about,
what I'm going to do is I'm gonna just show you
how to set it up on your cameras
so that you're ready to use the application.
That's just a quick preview
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