Playing with new photography software. I never was a fan of photoshop: there’s too much workflow to be learned, I always found it too complicated for my purposes, and also too expensive. I wanted my photos to look good while keeping the authenticity of the moment when they were taken – I don’t want fancy photos and I don’t shoot portraits or product photos. All photos on this website have been processed with DxO Optics Pro (since V4), Aperture (remember?), the Nik Tools, and Graphics Converter. It did take its time to develop a workflow that I think is sufficient to reach my goals, but time is going on and so does the state of photography software. The days of Aperture are gone (which is a shame, actually), and Optics Pro became Photo Lab (now in its 3rd version). I wasn’t even aware of Luminar with its wingman Aurora until recently, so it’s time for a test.
To make things a bit more challenging I’ve selected a couple of photos that I didn’t process before. They were taken under challenging conditions with low or insufficient light, a bad view angle, and a dynamic range that clearly outperforms my camera (Canon 40D), because they have a super bright sky with a shadowy street under it.
This is a window in the (former) Sint Lambertuskerk in Maastricht. As you realize, there was a very unfortunate light situation with rather few light coming through the window and that super bright spot coming from behind in the lower right corner. Another typical challenge is the photographer’s point of view: you often have a bad perspective with you looking up in a distance too close, so that even a shift lens (if you have) wouldn’t help that much. Now let’s see what we can do with this. (Click on each image for bigger resolutions.)
The image above was processed with Aurora only. Fortunately, Aurora not only lets you correct colors and lighting, but also geometric distortions. The St Mary’s window in St Lambertus church is circular, and correction was rather easy. Aurora is an HDR software, and to me the most challenging part is always to make things look real and authentic. Older HDR software often tries to make you push the levels to 11, but in this case the outcome is very satisfying. It took me 20 minutes from the messy original to this well-balanced photo. Details are preserved well and the colors are neither exaggerated nor loud.
After that, I did some further processing with Luminar, brightening up everything a bit, lowering down the brightest spots, and adding some more contrast which resulted in a slightly fresher look. This might not be my best window shot, but given the original material, it’s good enough. Aurora’s and Luminar’s usability is sometimes a bit fiddly, because you operate with careful adjustments of the softwares’ controllers, but fortunately you are allowed to enter values directly, which helps a lot.
This version was done with DxO Photo Lab. This was a rather quick edit, and you can see that contrast is far stronger than in the images above (and the circle more circular, ho-hum), but the result has the same quality as Aurora’s and Luminar’s output.
Now let’s look at some details:
This is Aurora’s output in a 100% resolution.
This is the result of post-processing the first image with Luminar.
And this is the DxO version. DxO Photo Labs doesn’t provide its own HDR module: you are using the excellent Nik Plugins, instead. These plugins still do amazing things, but especially the HDR tool shows its age, because it was designed to make particularly colorful images. It’s rather difficult to tame it, so you may use Color Effects, instead of HDR.
Since I wanted to play a bit further with Skylum’s softwares Luminar and and Aurora, I tried another photo. This is the original situation:
This is a scene from Amsterdam. Pretty bad. A very bright sky contrasting the dark buildings, especially that one in the foreground. That lady in the bottom left corner almost disappears in her blue dress; additionally, everything is totally distorted with these converging lines, because Amsterdam’s streets are narrow and there’s not much distance between you and your subject. A truly challenging photograph, and a perfect candidate for Luminar’s AI features. Let’s see what I got.
Not bad, eh? The buildings are straight (at least as straight as can be, because Amsterdam’s building are floating on muddy ground), the light looks much brighter and warmer, that lady in the foreground is finally recognizable, and the ivy’s green is looking fresh and, well, green.
But what’s that? Where does this sunny-with-cloudy-intervals sky come from?
This is one of the aforementioned AI functions in Luminar. Besides an overall ‘make this a pretty image’ effect, the software even lets you swap skies, and it looks pretty amazing. At first, the top of the church tower was a bit outshone with blue sky, but I was able to correct this. It’s not all that golden, though, because the closer you look:
The more you see these pixelated artefacts. If you keep its resolution small enough, it’s still usable, though, at least for web presentations.
Probably more interesting is a look at the dark corners in the foreground. Brightening up everything usually results in adding noise. That is something you want to reduce, but this makes everything a bit more blurry. Decisions, decisions. This is what I came up with:
Zoom at 100% of original image: dark and distorted.
After correction with Aurora: plausible colors, no distortions, tolerable blurriness after noise reduction.
And the winner is: all products deliver exceptional results. If you have used similar software before, you will find all three products easy to understand and use. You should try and test them all, Luminar and Aurora can be used freely for a week, DxO Photo Lab for a month. They all are certainly worth their money.
