The complete workflow in LRTimelapse 7. It works for any Raw, Jpg or DNG sequence, Holy Grail or not. You can use the internal editing tools but also add Lightroom Classic for more powerful edits.
Make sure to also check out my video tutorial for a more detailed and visual explanation of the process.
- Load your Sequence by choosing a folder on the left. Wait until the sequence has been loaded.
- Launch the Keyframes Wizard, it will automatically create some keyframes based on an automatic analysis of the luminance progression. By dragging the slider you can easily create more or less keyframes. Keyframes will mark the images, that you are going to edit manually – the develop-settings for all other images will be later calculated automatically by LRTimelapse.
You can create additional Keyframes by navigating to a frame and pressing the “1” key. Remove a keyframe via “0”. - The “Holy Grail”- Wizard will only be enabled for sequences shot according to the “Holy Grail” approach: changed Exposure-Time and/or ISO while Camera was shooting in M-Mode.
After enabling the Holy Grail Wizard, an orange compensation curve will be calculated to compensate for the Holy Grail camera adjustments.
The orange curve shows the compensations that the Holy Grail Wizard calculated for the camera adjustments.
The positions of the Rotate/Strech controls should be automatically set. Generally, the the orange curve should be as close to the horizontal middle line as possible. The thick cyan curve gives you an idea about the natural luminance transition.
- Save Metadata
- The double diamond icon indicates, that visual preview will be generated for the keyframes only.
- You can now start editing the first keyframe via the editor on the right.
- Alternatively you can use the more powerful tools in Lightroom for editing the keyframes.There are to scenarios to bring your sequence to Lightroom:
- If the sequence is not yet in the Lightroom catalog:
- Drag the button named Drag to Lightroom into the Lightroom Library. This will invoke the Lightroom importer. Here is a video tutorial on how the drag/drop works.
- Make sure that Add is selected at the top (not copy!!) to add the images to the Library.
- If the sequence has already been added to the Lightroom Catalog):
Either remove the sequence from Lightroom and proceed like described on A (recommended). Or:
- If the sequence is not yet in the Lightroom catalog:
- Select the filter LRT Keyframes to see only the keyframes.
- Now your sequence is in Lightroom and you should see the keyframes that you created in LRTimelapse as ****-Ratings.
- Edit those keyframes from left to right. If you are finished with one, select it, then Shift-Select the last Keyframe like this:
The left keyframe is the “most selected” – you’ll sync it’s settings to the other keyframes with the “LRTimelapse Sync Keyframes”-script.
Windows
Mac
The current keyframe will then be “most selected”, the others selected a bit darker. Now launch “LRTimelapse Sync Keyframes” from the Lightroom Scripts-menu – this will apply the settings from the first keyframe to all others.
Advanced tip: The LRTimelapse Sync Keyframes script will make sure that non of LRTimelapse’s internal adjustments will get overridden. Therefore it’s recommended to use this script over Lightroom’s internal “Synchronize Settings”. However, if you need to syncrhonize sinlge edits via Lightroom’s tool, make sure to exclude the internal masks that LRTimelapse created. In the Expert Tips Tutorial #7 I explain how to do more sophistiated syncing.
- Switch to the next Keyframe and make any changes in editing, if needed. You can change any tools you want (with few exceptions).
If you work with Masks (Gradients), please don’t create new ones – always use the predefined Masks that LRTimelapse created. And please don’t delete Masks! - Edit all keyframes like this. After each one, select the current one, then shift select the last one and launch the LRTimelapse Sync Keyframes script. (always shift-selecting to the last KF and not only the next has the advantage, that you can easily skip keyframes from editing, if they are already fine with the last settings.)
- Now save the changes: make sure, that again (like always when working with metadata) you are in Grid View (G), all keyframes are selected (Ctrl-A) and then use Metadata->Save Metadata to Files from the menu or Ctrl-S.
- Go Back to LRTimelapse and proceed with the second row of workflow buttons.
- Auto-Transition reloads the metadata for the keyframes and calculates the transitions for all images in between the keyframes. It will give you a short glimpse on all curves calculated in the preview, you might permanently turn on the display of all curves by clicking on “ALL” on the top right of the preview.
- The Visual Previews will now switch to “All Frames” mode and start developing the previews for the whole sequence.
- After they have been generated, the Visual Previews will now allow you to actually see the sequence with all edits applied! This is not only great to get a quick preview, it also allows you to apply deflicker based on the visual appearance of the developed images!
Usually after the auto transition LRTimelapse automatically starts developing Visual Previews for all images. You’ll get a pink curve that reflects the luminance progression after all develop settings have been applied (including the Holy Grail corrections, Lightroom edits etc…). - After all previews have been developed, have a look on the pink curve. Is it as smooth as you would have expected?
There might be a couple of reasons for a curve that is not so smooth at all:- Strong edits in Lightroom,
- Inaccurate real Exposure/Aperture/ISO in comparison to the Exif-Data that the camera writes,
- Natural changes in brightness
- Flicker due to camera inaccuracies.
You can see that the Holy Grail Wizard alone in this case is not sufficient to create a really smooth visual luminance curve after all developments have been applied.
- Set a reference Area for the deflicker by clicking into the preview and dragging a rectangle with the mouse. The reference area should span an area where no intended, natural short term changes in brightness occur but instead any flicker can be isolated as well as possible.
- Now activate the Visual Deflicker:
Drag the Smoothing slider until the green smoothed curve looks like you would like the pink curve to be. The green curve shood smooth any short term flicker but leave mid and long term changes in brightness alone. Multi pass deflicker will do several lossless (!) passes to improve the deflicker. On each pass usually less images need to get corrected because images that are already “on the green line” will not be touched again.
In order to learn more about deflickering, check out my Basic Tutorial.
This is how the pink curve looks after visual deflicker:
After applying the visual deflicker, the luminance curve of the developed images is really smooth, there are no residual flicker effects left in this sequence. It’s ready to get rendered!
- Click on Apply and wait until the visual deflicker has finished.
- Now either
- use the Internal Export and Render from the workflow toolbar.
- or: Switch to Lightroom, to export in highest quality from there.
- read the metadata for the whole sequence (Grid-View, Filter: LRT Full-Sequence, Read Metadata from Files)
- export via “Export” and the LRTExport plugin.
Rendering will be explained in the Export and Render Instructions.
