5 Minute HDR - a new series on YouTube
5 Minute HDR - create a beautiful HDR photo in 5 minutes or less, with Aurora HDR!
A few weeks ago, I was editing a photo with Aurora HDR. It was a pretty simple set-up and a pretty simple shot. It took me less than 5 minutes, including the experimentation that I always go through, which includes checking out multiple Presets and more.
After working through my processing steps, I realized that this might be helpful to others. I have heard people say for years that HDR is too hard, or too complicated, or that they could never learn to do it.
Wrong.
In truth, it’s very easy. Believe me when I say that I felt the same way, years ago. I too thought it was hard, and confusing, and complicated. But once you learn a few things, you will get your arms around it easily.
Now, every image is not a 5 minute thing. There are definitely some that take me quite a while, and there are even times when I give up on an image and decide to return to it at a later date. It happens. It can be frustrating, but just move on and accomplish something else.
Generally speaking, I don’t feel like HDR has to be complicated or difficult. It just requires a little practice, that’s all. You just have to get comfortable using software to merge and edit the shots, and then you are all set.
Aurora HDR from Macphun makes all of this extremely straightforward. In the old days, I had to use several products to accomplish everything I needed to do to an image. And yes, that made it a bit more complicated and time-consuming. I could never have done this using my old tools, because of all the back-and-forth between various programs.
Now I use Aurora HDR to combine the image, add presets or other adjustments (even textures), apply any noise reduction, and that’s it. I’m done. That's why I switched to Aurora. It simplifies my workflow and makes my photographic life easier. You can read about that here.
So, I did what I have been doing a lot of lately, and that is recording a video. I called it “5 Minute HDR” and I think I will turn this into a series on YouTube (kind of like my other series there, called “Making the photograph”). This series will be about showing how to quickly merge and edit an HDR image and still like the result.
If you like learning about photography and how I use Aurora HDR to post-process my photos, subscribe to me on YouTube and catch all my videos about it!
In this series, I plan to show you how I work through an image quickly and create something that I am proud of - all in under 5 minutes each time. It’s going to be fun for me, and I hope it will be helpful for anyone that takes the time to watch.
That’s the other complaint I have heard about HDR - the process is too long. Well, I think we all can spare 5 minutes to edit a photo, right? And before that, you can spare 5 minutes to watch my video, RIGHT? ;-)
I hope you enjoy this series, and please let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks for following along! Here are the two videos in the series so far - enjoy! More coming!
