To be honest, I don’t really use bracketing on my shots that often. I’m not really a big landscape or even astrophotographer. But have no fear — you can edit single images in Aurora HDR, too, which I was provided for review.

I do take some travel images, so I started playing with them. I was actually quite impressed with just how much was recovered from my images. Easily worked with RAW files straight from my backup drive.

Before you dive in

Before you dive into batch processing you may wish to open a single image and set up a User HDR look. Get yourself familiar with your settings … there is a lot to play with.

I really liked the HDR Enhance & HDR Details Boost for what it did with some of my images. It certainly pulled out the details and allowed for some subtle and not so subtle adjustments.

Setting up quick and easy batch files

I opened a single image which I wanted to use from my whole folder, created it just as I liked it and then saved my own User HDR Look. Once you start a batch process, you cannot edit the look you use, so it’s a great idea to create one, or find an existing Look from the collection that you really like and use that.

Once that is done, applying the same preset to all the images in your folder is really quick and easy.

First, select Open (top left corner) and select Batch Processing. You will see the following pop up where you can select the images from your folder.

Aurora HDR will then double-check you wish to proceed with the selected images. You can also make some changes here.

You can then select which Aurora HDR Look you wish to use and the opacity of it and where you want finished images stored. You can choose to overwrite, but I don’t recommend you do that. You can rename, select an image format, quality and even resize the images if you wish. When happy, select Process.

You should then see a Batch Processing progress meter.

Once finished, you can select to see the folder, or return to Aurora HDR to do other things. That’s it, all done!

When I was done with this series, I decided I needed something else to play with. I went looking for some nighttime light trail photographs I had taken with some friends, and then went back to Aurora HDR to run another Batch Process.

Final images

Before and after my Aurora HDR Look

Want to get started with Aurora HDR? Save $10 when you use the code PHOTOFOCUS!