Upgrade path to pro? Revised after upgrading.

At first I was a little upset about the clunky upgrade process because I was misled to think there would be a simple unlockable upgrade to pro built into the appstore version of this software. I left a negative review about that experience but now I’ve moved past it and been able to use the sotware and I must say I am truly impressed. I will still say that if you shoot RAW and plan on using the pro version of this software the App Store version is pointless, just buy the pro version directly from their website. They should have made this more clear from launch, actually before launch while they were offering a discount.

I have been using Photomatix Pro and Photoshop CC with several plugin packages for every HDR photo I’ve processed over the last 10 years and it was a multistep process that created several large files and took a fair bit of my time. Aurora HDR is powerful enough with its layers, masking, curves and sliders for every aspect of your photograph from colors to contrast to detail enhancing and noise reduction filters etc. etc. that I no longer need to use Photoshop at all to process an HDR photograph. There is nothing lacking in this software that you need to make stunning photos and in fact I got better results off the first bracket I processed than I’ve been getting after years of using the other software combination. It is much easier and more intuitive to do it all in one program like this where you can see the results for every step in the process and be able to go back and adjust every detail to taste as you make new changes. No more having your choices made in photomatix set in concrete on a TIFF file that you can only add to in photoshop. It is a much smoother, more enjoyable process and there are less files cluttering up my hard drive when I’m done. I honestly can’t recommend it highly enough, there is a ton of creative freedom here and at the price of $99 for the pro version it is cheaper than one plugin package that does far less, not to mention the monthly fees for Photoshop, which is suddenly much less essential to create awesome HDR photos. It doesn’t just trump photomatix and every other HDR processing program out there, it completely changes the paradigm of HDR editing by being an all-in-one solution from “load bracket” to “export to web”.

aumgrown about Aurora HDR