Aurora HDR 2018 is a fairly large program [~550 MB] to combine & process HDR photos, but the processing part works on regular, non-HDR images just as well. SOS has it for free for the next 4 days, but I picked it up as part of a Humble Bundle pack a while ago. The current version is Aurora HDR 2019, which adds their new HDR engine, & the *alleged special* upgrade price I was offered was $60, based on the copy I got earlier.
If you’ve got the disk space to spare, and if you do any photo work or processing, and if you do not have an active Adobe CC subscription [so no Photoshop or Lightroom], it’s well worth getting IMHO. That’s because it offers several higher end features in an easy to use GUI, that’ll let you adjust stuff like white balance, tint, detail, and Dodge [lighten] or Burn [darken] the parts of your photo you paint on. It’s not like the Franzis HDR app, which to me is much more about special FX to alter the photo than anything having to do with regular image processing or HDR.
HDR itself, in case you’re wondering, is the method where you take & then merge several photos that are identical except for [usually just] exposure settings. A camera sensor [or film] captures & records the light hitting the sensor over a variable amount of time – the shutter speed. The amount of light is further controlled by the size of the lens opening – the aperture. If the sensor records too much light, e.g. too slow of a shutter speed &/or too large of a lens opening, the picture will be somewhere between too light & white. If the sensor records too little light because of the shutter speed &/or lens opening, the photo will be too dark to black. Often in the real world a combination of shutter speed and lens opening will work fine for some parts of the scene you want to photograph, but not well at all for other parts of that scene. The idea of HDR is to take as many photos as necessary, but using different camera settings, so that you have one photo perfectly exposed for every part of the scene.
While that sounds a bit time consuming, many cameras in the mid to higher price range have a feature called bracketing. It lets you set the camera to take 2 or 3 or 4 [sometimes more] pictures every time you push the shutter button, each at a predefined step in the adjustment settings, e.g. faster, or a wider lens opening etc., so you could have one normal shot at whatever the camera automatically sets, & then 3 shots that were each progressively darker.
Now you could cut and paste parts of one photo into another to get things close to perfect, but HDR software instead combines the data from each shot into one larger file. It will not automatically look better, at least not always, depending on the software you use – instead you lighten or darken parts of the image yourself, and when you do that it uses the extra data in the combined file, so darkening shadows for instance doesn’t make them look like mud.
And it’s all the controls in Aurora HDR 2018 that you’d use to bring out those highlights & details in an HDR image that I feel you’d find useful, even when/if you don’t have the combined data from multiple shots. Yes, you could do the same stuff in say PaintShop Pro, and then some, but PaintShop Pro is anything but free.
