Wow! This is an extremely cool plugin that gives you all sorts of natural outdoor effects - from stars, to light beams, to water, atmosphere, haze and whole natural looking environments. Everything has adjustable parameters and there are many presets to choose from. You can also create your own environments and save them as a preset. Additionally, there is a Variation palette, much the same as Photoshop's Variations, which generates countless diverse effects and displays them in nine preview windows. Each effects setting has a page of controls you tab to. Within each tab 'page', you can create a second set of duplicate controls for that effect, and switch back and forth to compare two, or more, different effects settings.
Aurora recognizes all the 'turned on' layers in your open file, and loads them into its interface by their name. You can then select which layer you want the effects applied to.
My impressions of Aurora got me excited to do lots of natural environment effects. This is a hugely powerful plugin that should only take you an evening to feel comfortable using without having to read the manual. I do suggest to read the manual, because it offers many insights and how-to's for mastering Aurora.
A demo is available for download from Digital Element.
You'll love the interface of Aurora and I'm sure you'll have lots of fun using it - it as lots and lots of controls:
Here are some examples of what Aurora can do for your images:
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Original Image |
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Water added, with a little haze in the background. |
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Variations on the Sun effects. In random variations mode, it gave me this look of the hills being on fire, so I also added some Haze to the scene for more realism. |
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Stars. You can have many or a few. |
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One of the many presets applied to a blank layer. |
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Light Beam. This is slightly yellow in color, but can be any color you choose. |
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Haze. It's very easy to add a subtle effect. |
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A custom setting I made using one of the presets. I changed about every control I could find. There are tons of ways to get custom effects from Aurora. |
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Another preset where I tweaked the colors of blue and aqua, plus used the pan and tilt controls for added effect. |