Time lapse photography

Time lapse movies are really fascinating. If you own Adobe Lightroom or Camera RAW you can easily make your own time lapse movies. You can download all templates for free in the download section.

LRTimelapse will take your movies to the next level. It allows you to continuously change Adobe Lightroom or Camera RAW development parameters over the time enabling sort of key-frame animations like in video-processing. The great advantage over post processing in your favorite video production software is the way higher quality of pre processing on a RAW-file basis. Of course you can work with JPG as well.

Furthermore LRTimelapse is one of the best instruments to deflicker your time lapse movies.

Examples and use cases

• Alter white balance and other parameters over the time (for example for sun sets)
• Make the "Holy Grail" - (day to night transition) easy peasy
• Deflicker
• Make Ken-Burns effects (pan/zoom)
• Fade in / fade out
• Continuously saturate / desaturate
• and many more...

Before and after demonstration

All Sequences were edited with LRTimelapse!

Time lapse show reel Camary Skies

Time lapse show reel Baltic Skies

Time lapse show reel Alpine Skies

Some screenshots from the UI

Deflickering in action

Blue curve: average brightness of the single image
Green curve: smoothed average
Yellow curve: desired exposure
Red curve: calculated deflickered exposure

Please note that the recommended workflow has changed a bit as of LRTimelapse 1.6 / 1.7. Please watch this new tutorial video to get a grip on the new workflow. You can find the written workflow described here.

These are only a short overviews. For all details, tips and tricks please check out my new Ebook Time Lapse Shooting and Processing.

Screencast tutorial

Look at the screencast first, it shows how it works. You will see: it is simple but very effective.

Here is a forum-post where I explain in detail how to deflicker your time lapse sequences with LRTimelapse.

Basic workflow with Adobe Lightroom

Step 1: Start in LRTimelapse to prepare your images

1. Select the folder with your time lapse sequence
2. Say "yes" on the dialog that proposes to initialize the metadata for your files or initialize manually (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-I)
3. Wait until all previews are loaded
4. You might now play the time lapse via the little play-button below the preview to get a first impression.
   Please note that LRTimelapse only shows the original previews, never the developed images!
5. save

Step 2: Switch over to Lightroom

1. Open the folder with your time-lapse images
2. Go to grid-view (G), select all images (Ctrl-A)
3. Select Metadata -> Read metadata from files from the menu
4. Edit the first image of the series
5. Copy/paste the settings of the first image to the last
   (Ctrl-Shift-C, Ctrl-Shift-V)
6. Edit the last image of the sequence differently basing on the pasted settings
7. Mark your edited images with "one star", you might as well edit key-frame-images in between and mark them as key-frame (hit "1" to mark images as key frames).
   I recommend editing the key-framed images from left to right copy/pasting the settings of the previous key-frame as reference for the next and so on.
8. Save the metadata for the edited images (Ctrl-S)

Step 3: Return to LRTimelapse

1. Reload
2. Click on Auto transition for a smooth transition considering your key frames.
3. Deflicker if necessary.
   See the detailed deflicker guide.
4. Save

Step 4: Now go back to Lightroom

1. clear any filter, go to Grid-View ('G'), select all (Ctrl-A)
2. go to the metadata menu and chose "read metadata from files" this will update your sequence with the calculated transitions
3. now you can export the time lapse movie via the slideshow module. You will find the necessary templates in the download section and the instructions to install them on the install-page.

Voilà, that's it! Now it's your turn. Be creative!

Basic workflow with Adobe Camera RAW / Bridge

Since Lightroom is basically just a front end with an integrated library for Adobe Camera RAW you can use LRTimelapse not only to process the files created in Lightroom, but also to prepare your images for export as JPG (and use an arbitrary Software for video creation) or post process in Adobe After Effects.

Basically there is no big difference in the workflows between Lightroom and ACR besides that Lightroom requires to read/write metadata manually and Bridge/ACR does this automatically.

Here is a basic workflow for editing with LRTimelapse and Adobe Camera RAW / Bridge and either export a JPG sequence for video creation or optionally directly post process in After Effects.

Step 1: Start in LRTimelapse to prepare your images

See step 1 in the Lightroom workflow above.

Step 2: Go to Adobe Bridge

1. open the folder with your time lapse image sequence in Adobe Bridge
2. select all images (Ctrl+A), right-click on them and choose Open in Camera Raw...
3. edit the first image of your sequence, adjust the White Balance or other settings like exposure
4. Copy/Paste the development settings to the last image of the sequence
5. change the development of this last image - change the WB or whatever you like
6. You can edit intermediate "key-frame"-images as well - please mark them with a one-star-rating.
   I recommend editing the key-framed images from left to right copy/pasting the settings of the previous key-frame as reference for the next and so on.
7. hit Done (not "Open Object")

Step 3: Return to LRTimelapse

See step 3 in the Lightroom Workflow above.

Step 4a) Post processing in After Effects

Now you can either open you RAW-Sequence in Adobe After Effects:

• import the images into in After Effects
• check "Camera RAW Sequence" (or "JPEG Sequence" if you are working with those)
• process further
• render as .avi or .mp4.

or:

Step 4b) Post processing as a JPG-Sequence

You can use Adobe Bridge to export a JPG Sequence and use an arbitrary program to generate a movie from that JPGs.

In Bridge

1. Select the Export-tab on the left side.
2. select all images an drag and drop them to "Save to hard drive" on the export-tab.
3. double-click on save to hard-drive, you will get the export dialog.
4. choose a new folder to put your genrated jpgs in
5. export
6. depending on the software you are going to use for video creation, you might have to rename your images, you can use the batch rename feature (Ctrl-Shift-R) of Bridge to do so.

Now you have properly pre processed jpgs and you can use any software capable of making a video out of them.
Examples are: Quicktime pro, Avidemux, VirtualDub, Photoshop Extended.

Example for using Photoshop Extended to generate the Movie out of the JPGs

Open Photoshop Extended (>=CS3)

1. Chose File -> Open
2. Navigate to the folder with your image sequence
3. Select the first image
4. Check "image sequence"
5. Hit Open.
6. Chose a frame rate, i.e. 30 fps
7. You can check if the whole sequence was loaded under Window -> Workspace -> Motion. If only one image was loaded, the numbering of your files is not correct. I made best experiences with test-1000.jpg, test-1001.jpg and so on.
8. Now you can render the video via File->Export->Render Video.

The LRTimelapse forum

Please feel free to join the discussion in our Forums. You will get help there if you happen to encounter any problems. You are welcome to share your experiences and workflows there as well.

I will post news regarding LRTimelapse via the corresponding twitter account @lrtimelapse. Please follow me there. If you want to follow my private account (in German), it's @gwegner_de. Thank you!