Trying to move a slider just a point or two on a 1-100 range is impossible. You make a tiny move with your mouse (or Wacom pen) and you’ve vastly changed the look. My biggest gripe with Aurora is that the effects sliders (which control nearly everything in the program) are too narrow for fine control. It’s not a big problem, but it’s just weird. I think this is the only photo editor I’ve seen that doesn’t allow you to close one image before opening another.

If you imported the images from Lightroom, you can’t open a new image without returning to Lightroom. You work on a photo and export it, but you can’t close the image without either quitting or importing a new image. Oddly, Aurora doesn’t have a close command or a document close box. In contrast, Photomatix allows you to export merged 32-bit HDR files in several formats, including TIFF-32 which imports into Aurora. Those are probably enough choices for most photographers unless you want to exchange actual 32-bit HDR files with other editors (which appears to be impossible now). Now you can export to JPEG, JPEG-2000, TIFF, PNG, Photoshop, and PDF in both 8-bit and 16-bit color. In order to open an Aurora file in any other program (say, Photoshop) you change the format by using the export command. (This makes some sense with Aurora’s use of layers and other editing features not in most other HDR software.) It saves only in Aurora’s proprietary format, which cannot be opened in Photoshop or Photomatix. Just recently, the Windows version of Aurora finally got a simple Save command.

Not using the Mac version, I do not know which quirks are only in the PC version. Some of them may be due to the quickness of its port to Windows from the Mac OS. There is a lot of good in the program and several annoyances. I’ve been enjoying learning Aurora HDR for the PC since last October. There is a lot to admire in Skylum’s (formerly MacPhun’s) program, but it has its kinks and quirks, too. Today I’m going to focus specifically on Aurora HDR (with a few comparisons to Photomatix). In our earlier post, we did a general comparison between Photomatix Pro (Version 6) and the latest PC version of Aurora HDR 2018.

Aurora 2018 hdr lr plugin save as