Focus of Episode: HDR Photography in Aurora HDR

In this episode of The FIX, I show you the editing behind a shot that was posted as Photo of the Week on August 7th, 2016 called Hiking the Three Sisters in Fernie. I took the photo in the summer of 2014 on a solo hiking mission where I overnighted just below the peak of the mountain.

The hike that I did is called Heiko’s Trail and can be done in a day, but it is quite a long distance so I chose to overnight it. I camped just below the peak in a sheltered saddle, and then climbed up to the peak as the sun was setting. I was hurrying to get to the peak before dark, but turned around and got this shot of the sun setting over the mountains behind me. I took the shot as a bracketed exposure, which is a fancy way of saying that the camera quickly took 3 pictures. One that was properly exposed, one over exposed by two stops, and one under exposed by two stops. This allowed me to get the details of the bright sky, as well as the details of the dark shadowed mountains. 

To put the photos together, I used HDR software called Aurora HDR 2017. The original image was put together with Photomatix, but for this episode of The FIX, I decided to use my new favourite piece of software to see if I could get a better result. After combining the photos in Aurora HDR and doing some initial editing, I then did the final touching up and editing in Lightroom.