April 11, 2016
Cyclops Skull Arch, Alabama Hills, California, USA, and Aurora HDR Pro

Here's another image from our recent visit to the Alabama Hills. It's made from five exposures to capture detail from the dark foreground inside the Cyclops Skull Arch to the bright sky at sunset. My Lightroom HDR technique created an unwanted halo around the skull openings (see below), so I reprocessed it using Arurora HDR Pro (above). I was able to significantly reduce the halo, and along the way changed the color temperature a bit. Because Arurora HDR Pro worked so well for this image, I started to reprocess other recent HDR images. The first couple that I reprocessed looked much better than the Lightroom HDR results, but then I tried some images where Arurora HDR Pro failed miserably: there were still large blown out areas in the sky. So, before I do a detailed post about Arurora HDR Pro, I want to play with it a bit more.