Hello my name's Cal Thomson and today I'm going to show you how to shoot and edit a day
to night time-lapse up using a DSLR
You'll need a tripod, a camera and an intervalometer however these editing techniques will work for any camera
it could be a mirrorless it could be a GoPro.
There are two ways to capture a sunset using a DSLR. There's manual mode and then there's aperture priority.
Mostly when I'm shooting timelapse I stick to manual mode that means all the settings, the shutter speed, the aperture, the ISO, they're all fixed
and that way I can't introduce any artefacts such as flicker into my timelapse
I firstly start in manual mode you don't anything to be automatic except white
balance because this will change throughout the sunset.
I set my camera to ISO to 500, F5.6 and a shutter of 1/1000s
I also chose to shoot RAW which means I can edit the images later in post.
This is really important for us because we're going to be blending the exposures using Lightroom and we don't see any
loss in quality. As the Sun was setting I gradually change the shutter speed on my
camera using the wheel on the top I went from 1/1000s to 1/800s
All the way to a 1s exposure.
I set my interval to 10s which gave me plenty of time to change my shutter speed on the camera and also stand back to avoid any wobble.
If you chose to keep your settings fixed and didn't manually change the exposure during shooting
your timelapse is going to look something like this
Aperture priority is exactly what it says in the title. The aperture stays fixed as in it gets
priority and your shutter speed is changed gradually by the camera to maintain the exposure
When shooting in aperture priority mode, the camera did exactly what I did in manual mode
the biggest difference is that your cameras light metre
won't necessarily know the shooting conditions and you may end up with
under or over exposed image. Generally I've found my Canon 6D in aperture priority mode
does an absolutely fantastic job which means I wasn't constantly changing the
exposure and I could just relax.
Flicker is a huge issue when capturing a sunset timelapse. There will be a noticeable jump when going from one image to another
change the exposure but you have to do in order to keep up with the loss in light
I captured my sunset over the course of 2 hours, from about 4.30pm to about 6.30pm
The sunset was predicted at 6pm so I got there nice and early to make sure I didn't miss anything
Now the easy bit is done. Over to the edit suite to smooth out those jumps changes in exposure
So here's the inital shot straight out of the camera. As you can see there are horrendous changes in light
and that's what we gonna try to smooth out using Lightroom
I first start by importing all my photos into Adobe Lightroom.
A quick tip for your photos, try not to blow out your highlights like I've done been here. As you can see by the histogram
it's all gone completely white which means there's no more information to be retrieved
later in post. When it comes to your shadows, you can actually underexpose them
so it's almost black but you can pull those back later in post. With your highlights you cannot
So, yeah, that's hindsight for you.
I also use a 3rd party plugin called LR Timelapse. It's actually free for the first 100 photos and I've used it many times in my tutorials
After 100 you have to pay for a license. Here it is
You click on your folder. As you can see I took 859 photos and LR Timelapse has actually worked out thats a 0:28s timelapse
It looks really complicated first but honestly it's not. As you can see on the left hand side you've got a preview window.
You can scrub through it and see what your time-lapse is going to look like
This is the exposure curve. As you can see we go from brighter, down to darker as the Sun disappears
You can also see here my settings. Aperture was at F5.6 throughout and shutter speed. As you can see gradually changes as we
start to lose light. ISO stayed the same at 500. As you can see, there's a number of different workflow options up here.
We're going to stick to basic workflow and go into the rest at a later date
Once you've hit initialise you then want to hit keyframe wizard
Did the settings change whilst shooting the sequence in the Holy Grail Method?
Now the Holy Grail Method is essentially what we've done today
shooting a time-lapse with changing light throughout your time lapse
I'm not really sure what it's called the Holy Grail, maybe because its really difficult to do, but I'm showing you how to do it so it can't be that hard
Anyway, I'm going to click 'yes'
As you can see in my preview window, there's loads of little notches on this line here
And as we scrub through, we see moments in which the shutter speed changes, there are a couple of little arrows here
The shutter speed has changed, a couple more little arrows and the shutter speed has changed. They're keyframes that have been added
just before and just after these changes in exposure. Now this is really important
It happens throughout the entire time-lapse, all the way down to the bottom there
Then you want to hit 'Save' LR Timelapse will then create an XMP file which can be read by Adobe Lightroom.
So back in Lightroom we select all by hitting CMD A and a right clicking, metadata, read metadata from files
You can see now there's a couple of stars on certain images. You've got 1 star which represents the first frame of your time-lapse
You've then got 2 stars, and 3 stars. If we click on the 2 star, you can see our settings up here.
F5.6, 1/1000s. If you jump one frame to the right, to a 3 star, you've got a change in shutter speed here
So the keyframes from LR Timelapse have been transferred over to Lightroom, very clever!
Now we don't want to edit each individual photo because that would take forever
So we're going to edit just the keyframes and then LR Timelapse is going to blend the shots between each keyframe making our lives a hell of a lot easier.
So we want to show all the starred images, so we click 1 and higher
These are all the images that we have to edit. So rather than do 800 images we're going to edit 100, much easier
We'll start on the first one, we need to match the exposures between each shot. Now the 1 star and the 2 star don't actually
we have any changes in exposure so we can edit them normally like I've done in all my tutorial
because we shot RAW there's loads of information there
So what we're going to do is, bring down the highlights, bring up the shadows a little bit, not too much
do my white point, hold ALT, do my black point, hold ALT again, until a little bit of black creeps in
just to increase the contrast a little bit, add some clarity, add some vibrance, and a bit of saturation
So if I wanted to I could change my color temperature, my tint and my exposure, all of that can be changed here
but for now that's okay, not a bad little edit. I can hit \ to see the before and after
Very, very quick, but it has improved
Now we hit CMD, Shift + C, copy all
Move onto our next one, we haven't made any changes to exposure so we can hit CMD + V
Now the next moment is when our exposure has changed so we need to match total exposures
So we click on a two-star hold SHIFT and click on a three star, as you can see two star is slightly a different colour to this one
Got to 'Settings' > match total exposures
that way we're just focusing on exposure. Back onto our 3 star
So if we look at our 3 star, our exposure has actually been brought down, so Lightroom has taken all the information within the image and tried to match the exposure between the two shots.
We also want to copy over all the highlights information, so hit CMD, SHIFT, C again. This time, untick exposure because we don't want to change that
Go to the three-star, hit CMD paste.
So all our highlight information will be moved over to there
If we fancy, we can change the clarity or we can change our shadow information, whatever you need to do
But I'm quite happy with the way the image looks so I'm not going to change anything
I do however have to match the exposures, so I click on 3 star, hold SHIFT, click on our 2 star, the next keyframe, match total exposures
CMD, SHIFT C, copy everything except for exposure and PASTE
I might have to jumpy between the two shots, just to see what the image looks like
sometimes Lightroom does a great job in matching the exposures, sometimes you might have to tweak it a little bit
so I might just bring that up ever so slightly
I'm then going to continue this process of CMD, SHIFT, C, copying everything, CMD V, clicking on the image before, hold SHIFT and click
and then match total exposures and do that to all of our images until we've completed the time lapse
Select all, right click, metadata, save metadata to files
Okay, when you're back in LR Timelapse, you hit Reload
This brings all the information from Adobe Lightroom back into LR Timelapse. I know theres a bit of backwards and forewards
but it's definitely the best option for you
You then hit 'Auto transition' and as you can see here is a list of all the settings that we've changed, we've got white balance, contrast
highlights, shadows, we changed them every so slightly throughout the whole time-lapse
And LR Timelapse has taken all the information and blended them all together
so if you look at our exposures, there are tiny little adjustments between each frame
and that way hopefully there won't be any obvious jumps or huge flickers within our time-lapse, you then hit 'save'
You then go back to Lightroom, select all, read metadata from files
we manually matched the exposure between the 2nd and 3rd sta. LR Timelapse has blended the exposure between the 3rd
scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll and the 2nd star. Can you imagine doing that individually on every single frame
LR Timelapse has done that all for us
it has also brought forward all of the highlights, shadows, blacks, whites and clarity information that we edited earlier
Between LR Timelapse and Lightroom, they are blending all of the exposures
for the further 800 photos that I took that day. You can scroll through your entire sequence and view all
of the updated files with corrected exposures.
The next step is to export the final time-lapse, so you can do it in Lightroom by going File> export
You can export a load of jpegs, import them into after effects
and export a video file, I've shown this in a previous tutorial which you can click here
Or you can render off the video in LR Timelapse by clicking File> Render and following the steps
Sometimes I like to go into After Effects with a jpeg sequence
just in case I had any movement within the shot maybe I had a couple of wobbles
on the tripod and I can smooth those our using warp stabiliser
All in all, both options work pretty well. Aperture priority gives you options to do other things
rather than manning the camera. Obviously don't leave it unattended unless you're in a safe area
Manual mode gives you the opportunity to get a bit more creative with your shots
ensure you get the correct exposure.
The final shots, definitely aren't perfect and I'm sure if I spent a little more time I could reduce that flicker even further.
but this was just to demonstrate technique. So I hoped your learned something new.
My name's Cal Thomson, cya soon