Think of Aurora’s Looks like a recipe you would find in a cookbook. You follow the instructions describing how to combine ingredients, prepare the food and then cook it to make a meal. Along the way, you learned how each ingredient affected the flavor. You experiment by adding or removing ingredients and now the recipe has become your own. Sounds delicious right? Well, instead of a cooking lesson, that’s the concept behind understanding and create Aurora HDR Looks.

What are Aurora HDR Looks

Aurora HDR Looks are made up filters whose settings have been adjusted to get a particular effect. They can also include textures, LUTs, blending modes, and opacity changes made to a filter or a layer. Aurora includes an extensive collection of one-click Looks created by professional photographers from around the world. You can start with any one of these, make changes to it and then save it as your own.

Applying an Aurora HDR Look

Applying an Aurora HDR Look is simple.

  1. Clicking the Aurora HDR Looks Panel button on the Top Toolbar will toggle displaying or hiding the Aurora HDR Looks panel.
  2. Click collections to view different sets of Looks that are available. Examine the looks by exploring their thumbnails at the bottom of the page. Each Look offers a live preview of how the image will appear with the Look applied.
  3. Apply a Look by clicking on its thumbnail. To adjust the intensity of the effect, use the Amount slider to lower the opacity of the adjustment.

Creating your own Aurora HDR Look

If you find yourself making the same changes when editing images, it’s time to create your own Aurora HDR Look.

  1. Start by selecting an Aurora HDR Look as a base. Customize the Look by simply making adjustments to the filters to get the effect that you want. Notice the Filter titles are in gold. This tells that changes have been applied to that filter.
  2. When you are ready, choose the ‘Save Filters as Aurora HDR Look..’ from the bottom right corner of the window
  3. Any custom Aurora HDR Look you create can be found in the User Aurora HDR Looks collection.

Now you have a better understanding of Aurora HDR Looks and how to create them. If you have further questions, please leave a comment below for me or other Photofocus authors. We’ll do our best to answer questions in a timely manner. You can also search Photofocus for other articles, videos or tutorials on Aurora HDR 2019. Click this link to purchase Aurora HDR 2019. This offer includes a bundle of training videos, a set of really useful Looks and LUT’s too.