I have a current project that requires HDR and was surprised to see that my last inquiry about state of the art Tone Mapping software was one year ago.
Today I tested SNS-HDR, Skylum Aurora, and Affinity Photo for suitability with an emphasis on getting the most natural yet effective results on wide range subject matter.
I am left with opinion that SNS-HDR is the most effective of the three mentioned here. It provided the most natural looking output, and has the most detailed set of controls should you need to work through a challenge.
The Skylum website talks a big talk, and goes so far as to explain why it is much better than SNS-HDR, but what I found is that the basic HDR merge and tone mapping was cruder than SNS-HDR, and it had few useful controls for improving on the basic result. Admittedly it does have dozens of parameters which you can use to hype up your image and turn it into some sort of spectacle. It seems to me that Aurora is meant to be a one stop solution that frees you from using a bunch of apps or plugins, but for me the most basic natural settings could not match the grace with which SNS-HDR handles lighting challenges, and I was confident that I could easily use other plugins and apps to pump up the hype, should I want to do so,
I would also like to mention that the install on my Windows 7 x64 machine seemed laboriously slow as the "installer" .exe is just a download manager, so you end up watching files download that you may have hoped had already downloaded.
Finally, I had some insights into the way Skylum operates, as my install ran the merge process and then halted with a "Upgrade to Open GL 3.3" dialog and a blank screen. I learned that I am not the only one to have this issue. I got to review how Skylum handles support, and was amused to see suggestions that if users want to use powerful software that requires OpenGL 3.3 they should get a new computer etc. My computer was running Open GL 4.+ and I knew it, so I figured out that Aurora, which is seemingly written by Macintosh aficionados, just doesn't do a good job of communicating with Windows computers that have display managers set to automatically choose between on board and accelerated graphics hardware. I fixed the problem, by adding an entry in my Nvidia console to make Aurora always use the acceleration. I have nearly a hundred full featured applications on my system and Skylum is the only vendor that can't get their app to work with the automatic assignment function. It was disheartening to see that Skylums support did not know how to support their customers with technical solutions, and I figured that was a warning sign to keep in mind. Luckily for me, the lackluster HDR merge and tone mapping results relieved me of a compulsion to put up with further inconveniences.
I also tried Affinity, and I am very enthusiastic about it as a free standing photo editor. It installed fast and it felt very intuitive to jump right in and use with a sense of familiarity. The HDR capabilities worked ok, but don't seem to compare to the capability of SNS-HDR. The tone mapping controls were very basic, and I was incapable of matching the subtlety that I achieved with SNS-HDR.
Thank you for the great suggestions.
I did try these all last year, but It took me a while to sit down and focus with the recent tests. I am glad I did. I always feel like the technology improves faster than I can stay aware, so it is a relief to think that I can spend some time using SNS-HDR without thinking about the tech.
Thank everyone.
Happy New Year.