This is where you switch to the manual tools on the right for any fine-tuning, and these are organised into collapsible Tone Compression, Tonality, Colour, Selective Adjustments and Finishing panels. HDR Efex Pro use the open image to display ‘live’ previews for each preset, so it won’t take you look to find a look that’s close to the one you want. Previous versions offered around 30 preset HDR ‘looks, and the Nik Collection 2 update adds ten new “En Vogue” looks to this list, and they offer a good range of effects and ‘looks’. Once your exposures are merged or your file opened, you’re presented with a full image preview in the centre of the screen, an array of preset effects arranged in categories in a vertical panel on the left, and manual HDR tools stacked in a panel on the right. HDR Efex Pro 2 does a good job of merging different exposures, removing chromatic aberration and controlling ghosting artefacts pretty well. This is the route you’ll need to follow if the brightness range in the scene is too great for a single exposure, even with the extra dynamic range headroom of a RAW file. There are two ways to create an HDR image with HDR Efex Pro 2 – you can load a single image (ideally a RAW file, which you can now do via the Nik Collection 2 and DxO PhotoLab) and use the software’s tone-mapping and HDR tools to pull out the shadows and pull back the highlights, or you can follow the more technically correct route and merge a series of different exposures. It’s part of the DxO Nik Collection, which you can get from the DxO website. This is the same process used by Aurora HDR, Lightroom’s HDR Merge tool and other HDR programs. HDR Efex Pro is a tool for merging bracketed HDR exposures and then apply tone mapping and HDR effects to the merged image. It still wraps it up in a bit too much jargon (some of it specific to this particular software), but it does produce a good variety of ready-made HDR presets so that you don’t have to get caught up in the manual adjustments if you don’t want to.
HDR Efex Pro 2 manages to make HDR relatively easy, and it produces ‘good’ HDR which is dynamic, rich and exciting rather than overprocessed and cheesy.
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