Aurora HDR App Reviews

Looking forward to learining how to use all the tools and features and the customer support team is right there when you need them.

HDR lovers rejoice! At last we have some great software that enables us to create amazing results, without the use of Adobe! Aurora has the ability to really get the most out of your pictures, even if you only have a single photo. I found the results to be much better than Intensify CK & is well worth the upgrade. The extra controls that Aurora has enable you to finely tweak your pictures and get subtle HDR results. The presets included from Trey Ratcliff provide fantastic & immediate results that will delight with. You can edit from within Photos Extensions which makes for an easy workflow & keeps everything in one place. Customer service is also excellent.

Aurora seriously impressed me by coupling power with simplicity and accessibility. There’s a great variety of presets available in the app for most all photo subjects, which offer an assortment of different professional-looking effects, each with their own unique personality. I was surprised by the amount of distinct looks the sets of presets could add to a single photo; theres certainly a lot of room to be creative. I was pleasantly surprised at all of the different subtle details in color, lighting and texture that Aurora was easily able to highlight and enhance in my pictures. Although just a click away in Aurora, many of the presets would likely take plenty of time to replicate in Photoshop or elsewhere, and finding more is easy. Although it offers serious power, everything the app offers is made available in a sleek interface that makes it simple for even someone new to photo editing like me to apply an edit quickly and then fine-tune it to get just the right effect. Performance is fast and responsive, and its fun and easy to get top-notch results out of the app. For the power and variety of effects that it offers for the money, Aurora HDR is a great value and certainly a tool Id recommend adding to the arsenal of any photographer, amateur or professional.

This one is way better than any other HDR editors on the marked. I switched from Photomatix to Aurora HDR without any doubts

Warning - this is not the full version of the app; this version does not process RAW files. It may seem like a good deal but you have to buy an upgrade that is more than the cost of the app...

Really good app for HDR photo editing! I like it and rrecommend for everyone.

Ok, first, this app is fantastic at what it does but so miserably integrated into Photos that it may as well be useless. Supposedly this is useable as an extension in Photos but it does not support RAW. I paid the 60$ to upgrade to pro and guess what, that does not support extensions! So at the moment there is no way to use this application for editing RAW files in Photos without manually exporting the RAW file, manually loading that into the program, exporting the file to disk and then importing that file back into photos. So now I have two versions in Photos and no edit history on the modified file. This is just irritating. Aurora, Photos is designed from the ground up around RAW processing. Disabling RAW in your products just breaks Photos altogether and honestly I wish Apple would disallow this kind of rediculous policies to get approved in the App store. However, the app itself is so very good. PS. As a workaround I found that if I edit something useless like bumping exposure by 1% I can load the image into this program without hitting the RAW restriction. By modifying _anything_ the file gets loaded as a TIFF instead of a RAW file and this gets around the restrictions on RAW using Photos. Seems like a very silly workaround to a problem that should not exist in the first place.

First of all, as others have pointed out, you have to upgrade to the pro version to use RAW’s. That’s OK, but as has also been mentioned you cannot export from Lightroom or Photoshop. I have been experimenting with HDR software for some time and have five or six programs. There are many caveats to HDR photography. First and foremost, does your scene require it. I use a spot meter to get an idea of exposure values. If you don’t have a wide range of EV’s in the shot, you don’t need HDR. Next, what range of exposure bracketing are you going to attempt. Remember, plus two EV or plus 3 EV may just burn out highlights. Low EV’s will create noise. You also need to look at movement in the shot. Some shots just don’t lend themselves to HDR because of ghosting. Finally, are you going for a realistic effect or do you want the otherworldly surrealism that HDR can produce. I have used Photoshop, Lightroom, Canon Digital Photo Professional, HDR Efex Pro, Photomatix and now Aurora. They all have strengths, but Aurora is not the strongest contender of the group. It is easy to use, but the shots I did lost a lot of sharpness in fine details. I got the best results and most control with Photomatix. Yes, Aurora is easier to use. Is it a “pro” application? Possibly not. I will give it more testing, but if you take the time and trouble to learn Photomatix, I think you will be happier with the results. Photomatix is harder to learn, but has much greater flexibility in preprocessing images for the final merge.

As stating on their site the mac app store version of this is not the pro version if you want to invest 40$ in a program that doesn’t offer you all of its features go right ahead. I recommend spending 40+$ in a program who’s developer isn’t hiding things from people that support them.

I was using the App Store version at first. If you are an amateur photographer, it will satisfy 100% of your needs. I then reached out to the developer support team, asking if I could get a discount on the Pro upgrade, and guess what - they gave me a 10% discount. Great customer service and incredibly great software. That’s why I went ahead and purchase Aurora HDR Pro as well!

I like a smooth and friendly interface of the product: easy use tools and a huge variety of presets. If you want to get incredible and stunning HDR pictures and don`t want to spend a lot of time, Aurora HDR is exactly what you need.

Im not a serious HDR photographer, but Ive wanted to play with HDR for a while. I purchased HDRtist Pro some time ago, and took some 2-exposure and 3-exposure sets of outdoor photos last fall, for an HDR experiment. I wasnt happy with the results; they looked unnatural (I should emphasize Im not a very experienced digital photo editor). When Aurora HDR was released, I downloaded the Pro version demo from the company site, and experimented with those same photos. I very quickly got much better results than I had achieved with the other app. Aurora HDR somehow manages to provide more controls and still come across as more accessible to a novice user. I subsequently purchased the app store version (not "Pro"), and was happy to find all the essential controls still there. Particularly valuable are the presets, which quickly get me in the ball park of what Im looking for, with only minor tweaking needed. Today I had to prepare a small photo album for an event shot without a flash in a poorly-lit room with a Panasonic Lumix LX5 camera—unusually good in dim light for a P&S, but still challenged by the low light. It was for a meeting with lecturers showing Keynote/Beamer presentations, so there was bright content on some images. I tried editing the shots in Photoshop Elements, Affinity Designer, GraphicConverter, and c/fx Photo, with none of them producing satisfactory results in my non-expert hands. On a whim, I gave Aurora HDR a try. Very quickly I was able to make usable (albeit not beautiful) versions of the photos. Again, a preset got me in the ballpark, and some adjustments to the color saturation and vibrance, and adding noise reduction, got me usable shots. I was particularly impressed with how effectively just a bit of noise reduction worked. This app has pretty much everything a non-pro like me needs to do *non*-HDR photo editing, and presents it all in a very usable "flat" interface (without lots of palettes or inspectors, just a scrolling tool drawer). MacPhun could market this as a great general-purpose photo editor that just happens to provide great HDR capability. A favorite photo-app purchase!