Solid & simple HDR; unusually effective & accessible underexposed photo editing

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!

TLMuse about Aurora HDR