Aurora HDR Update
Besides the updates released last week also Skylum updated their HDR tool Aurora HDR to version 1.2.0.
According to Skylum they improved the performance of Aurora HDR and brought the Mac version more in line with the Windows version of the tool. For the later their is an information page on the comanies website informing about the differences between the Mac and the Windows version. The update to version 1.2.0 is free of charge for registered users of Aurora HDR 2018.
In contrast to earlier versions and also the RAW converter Luminar from the same company this time update worked out without any problems. And even the update of the Lightrom plugin didn’t cause any errros.
The main improvement according to Skylum is a gain in performance which makes the tool up to 4x faster on Windows systems compared to the old version. But after testing the tool with different images i don’t see a big difference. To test this i loaded raw files from my Canon and my Lumix G81 directly, while i usually use already processed 16-Tiff files for HDR merging. I can state a minmal improvment only (1,9 vs. 2.1 sec) but this shouldn’t make any difference in practise.
But also generating the HDR image from 3 raw files the is a marginal difference, arround 10% from 21 to 19 sec. with the new versions. So i can’t find an improvement in speed which is close to the promised 4x faster in the companies website. Only exporting a final HDR image to 16-Bit Tiff there was a significate difference.
After the HDR image is generated the main window shows up and there are 2 new menupoints to notice compared to the last version. The first menuepoint “Image” contains functions for horizontal or vertical image flip, functions that were available to the Mac versions of the tool. The second menuepoint “View” contains options to turn on/off some displays.
In addition Aurora HDR 1.2.0 supports the specialized keyboard Loopdeck , which so far is supported by Lightroom Classic CC only. Since i don’t own a loopdeck keyboard i can’t check out this point. 😉
If the update would have been with costs i would react much more critical, because the performance gain isn’t actually noticable and the other improvements are marginal only. Whats important, even though i wouldn’t miss the functions in my workflow is keep up with the Mac version.
ciao tuxoche
