This program, created by Digital Element, is a sophisticated lady dressed down in simple clothing.  If you are familiar with 3D software, you know how complex and incredibly detailed they can be.  Aurora has taken some of the complex out of it, and attempted to make it easy for those with no 3D experience to create environments easily.  Simply stated, Aurora works with the layers in Photoshop to make it simple to create skies (sun, stars, clouds) and water (water surface, reflection) and introduce things such things as haze and volumetric light into a photo. You can add these as elements into an outdoor picture or use Aurora to create an environment to place your images in.

Don’t expect to install the program and start creating cool scenes within the hour.  My first attempt resulted in a photo with my head as the sun coming up on the oceans horizon (not what I was going for). There are tutorials included that I strongly recommend you take the time to use, step by step.  There are so many variations and tweaks that it’s easy to get some weird, uncalled for effects that will set you back eons if you don’t know what your doing.  Once you get to know the controls, (opacity depth, refract, phong, specular) you still need to carefully adjust each slider, or else.  It also took a while for the program to crank the final effects into the image, returning to Photoshop.  I wouldn’t recommend this program to those still running small, slower computers.

Digital Elements says this program is useful for landscape and traditional architects, game developers, web, CG artists and creative services.  I’d say they are right on the money.  If you don’t fall into any of these categories, you probably don’t need to waste the time it takes for start-up, but if you do have a need for these specialized effects, the GUI is simple and clean, and the results satisfying.