today's video is sponsored by squarespace hey everyone nico carver here today the topic is
going to be astro time lapses which is something i really love shooting but for some reason have
never made a tutorial video on and so the way to shoot a time lapse is really simple
it's just like shooting astrophotography deep sky astrophotography untracked where you set up your
camera on a tripod you focus on the night sky you set it up to take a sequence of photos and you let
it go the only difference with uh doing untracked you know deep sky astrophotography and time lapse
astrophotography is with deep sky you're going to re-center the object
every so often with time-lapse you don't re-center you just you just let it go for as long as you can
hours is optimal because what happens with time-lapse photography is it compresses
that time way down because you're going to show the frames back at 30 frames per second
but each frame is probably like 15 seconds long because you do it with a wide angle lens
and there's all kinds of great objects to shoot with time lapse um you know i'm going to show
a few here that are really classic ones the milky way and clouds uh you know we always
get getting clouds but they can actually be an interesting part of a time lapse
the comet neowise uh last summer was that last summer two summers ago i think and uh the aurora
that's the one i'll show in this uh tutorial is is shooting aurora which i shot in iceland number
of years ago now it's actually really how i got started with all this and so in this video what
i'm going to be showing you is uh not the shooting part because that's pretty simple just focus on
the night sky take as many photos in a row as you can with like an intervalometer or a timer
the part that a lot of people don't know is how do i take all of those raw photos and turn them
into the finished video and so i'm going to show you how to do that in adobe photoshop it's sort
of a hidden feature of photoshop and it's one that i think is really cool but before we get
into that let me tell you about today's sponsor which is squarespace so i was really excited
with squarespace reached out to sponsor this video and then the next three after this one
because i'd been wanting to revamp and do something with nicocarver.com for years now
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and it's a responsive design so it looks good on the mobile phone or on a desktop and it allows
me to just showcase my photography in a really beautiful way i can choose how much space i want
between the photos i can choose how i want the grid layout to look all of that is completely
customizable with their software and very easy to do without any knowledge you know knowledge
of how websites work you could do this um it's it's a really cool tool with different themes
and it allowed me to do something i've wanted to do for a while now which is showcase some of
my work outside of astrophotography as well so over the next series of videos i'm going
to be continuing to build this out and show you more tools that you get with squarespace
so i won't spoil it all right now but i just did want to show you this you know i've built
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and uh purchase you know the service it's 10 off with the code nebula photos all right let's jump
in now into time lapse with photoshop so the first thing you're going to do after
you've shot all of your photos that are going to go into the time lapse are put them all into a
folder so transfer them off your sd card somewhere on your computer or on some kind of hard drive so
you can see all of my raw files are here i'm going to select them all by pressing command a because
i'm on mac it would be control a on windows and then double click okay and you may already know
this if you're a photoshop user but when you open a raw file into photoshop it actually
opens it up into this helper application called camera adobe camera raw which is very similar
in in a lot of ways to lightroom lightroom is sort of like uh adobe camera raw but for
batch editing in a in a more serious way um it can do a lot more with batch editing but almost all
of the same kind of tools that are in lightroom are in adobe camera raw just in different places
anyways i'm going to do something just very simple in here and with time lapse i recommend
keeping it pretty simple just sort of using the basic parameters here not delving too much into
selective adjustments or anything like that because things can go a little bit wonky there
all i'm going to do is because i shot this at i think too too low in iso i'm going to raise up
my black level so i'm just going to take it from zero raise it all the way up to plus 100 so you
can actually see the foreground and then i'm going to copy that adjustment to all of the photos in
the sequence here so i'm just going to click down here press command a it would be ctrl a on windows
and click the synchronize button which is this button right here so
here's the first picture in the sequence i'm going to click the synchronize button
and you can see there's a bunch of different things it can synchronize
the only one we're really interested in is blacks but we don't have to worry about the other ones
since we didn't touch them and click ok and you can see what happened there is it synchronized
that black level adjustment across all of the different photos in the sequence and you can
see just in 30 seconds the aurora is moving there as i sort of just go between these three photos
next thing we're going to do is uh export all of the photos in the sequence so we don't want
to click open down here because that would open up all 100 and whatever photos into
photoshop and be a big mess what we want to do is go up here to the upper right of the window
and find this little export button it says convert and save selected images oh and we first want to
select them all so let's press command a or control a again there we go and now i want
to convert and save all these images and i don't want to save them in the same location i want to
save in a new location i'm going to click here to this folder that i already created called
aurora dash tiffs on the desktop and click select and i can leave the rest of this all alone
here file naming that's sort of interesting like if you found that you had to remove some of the
frames because there was a problem with them and then there was a gap in the numbering you might
want to mess around with this and actually give it a new name like you could say frame whoops
frame plus a five digit serial number and then it would rename all of the the
files in your sequence sequentially because you that's the key thing is you want all of
your files to be sequential with no gaps for photoshop to work best
but i'm just going to do the document name because i don't think there's any gaps in my
sequence okay so let's go ahead and click save and you can see that the window doesn't go away
right away that's because it's actually saving off all of the files and so you can see down
here the progress it's making 96 remaining this is just a short sequence because i wanted to
you know not have it drag on too long and i'm not gonna wait uh on this video for them all to save
off because it does take a little while so i'll just cut and we'll pick back up when this is all
saved off okay so it is now finished you can see all of my tiff files here in this new folder let's
go back to photoshop and click open and i'm going to go to my desktop click aurora.tiffs
click on the first tiff in the folder and then this is very important this is the magic thing see
right down here you'll see this little box that says open as image sequence when you hover over it
you want to click that box so again the order of operations here is gold go to your folder of tiffs
click on the first tiff file then click the little check box next to image sequence then click open
and the next thing that will happen is photoshop will ask you what frame rate you want to use
and so you can use a custom frame rate you can use one of the standards like 60 or 30 or 24.
i'm going to for this sequence use 15. this is a very short sequence i didn't capture it long
enough and so to get a reasonable length for the time lapse like over five seconds long
i'm going to use 15 frames per second um but normally for a very smooth time lapse i like to
use at least 24 frames per second so let's click ok and it opens into photoshop and it looks just
like you know on the based on the canvas a single photoshop image but if we look over here in the
layers panel you can see there's this little film strip icon and it's it's in this thing called
video group one so we know something's going on but we have to turn on a key panel
to actually get control over our time lapse and that key panel is under the window menu
and it's the timeline panel so this is an alphabetical list of all the different panels
you can open up in photoshop we're going to open up the timeline panel and there we go
and if it opens up you know too large on your screen just shrink it down here like this
we can add audio tracks right here so you can click add audio from this little music icon and
if you wanted to you could add audio right here in photoshop i i know this is probably blowing
some people's minds that photoshop has like a full video editor and there is a bunch of
stuff you can do in here that i'm not going to go over everything but one key thing that i want
to show you is that all of photoshop's tools and adjustment layers are still available to you here
as a video so this gets really interesting because um you you know there definitely are other tools
for making time lapses but i don't know of any that are as flexible and let you do as much image
processing on the time lapse as photoshop will so i can just you know click a curves adjustment
layer here and i can brighten up my whole video so it's really really nice to just be able to you
know edit this as i would a single photo but it's actually editing the entire time lapse and so you
know you can add saturation you can play around with this it's i think with time-lapse video it's
easy to go overboard with the processing so i i always sort of you know go subtle
another thing we can do uh right here is this is a fairly um heavy time-lapse and by that i mean
every frame in this time lapse is a 16-bit tiff that's 6 000 pixels wide something like that so
we could go ahead and crop it or change the image size and it will apply to the entire time lapse so
i'm just going to crop to a 16 by 9 like so and then i'm going to also resize it down to
so right now it's like 5500 pixels wide i'm going to resize it to 4k which is a standard video size
so i'm going to type in 3840 that's that's the 4k size 3840 by 2160 okay
says transforming a video layer requires converting it into a smart object layer
that's fine click convert okay and then i'm sure what a lot of you are wondering is
well how do we actually see it as a video you have this video timeline down here
can we just play it back and the answer is yes but if we just hit play here it's going to be
painfully slow it's not going to play back in real time and the reason for that is because uh
photoshop hasn't yet saved every image in the video to a memory buffer once it does that once
it's rendered out every frame in the video then it can play back in real time but until it does
that it will play back very very slow it's playing back at less than one frame per second here um the
faster your your graphics card i think the faster this whole rendering thing will happen um but on
my you know 10 year old macbook here uh it's it's it's pretty slow so i'm going to let it render the
entire time lapse sequence and then we can watch it back in real time together and decide if this
is ready to export okay and it's done rendering so let's play it back now and see how it looks
wow i love that i love when it uh right after the big sort of explosion and light
it this pink streamer comes off right there looks so cool anyways so at this point uh to
continue with the tutorial if you were unhappy at all with how it looked you know after seeing
it in motion you could continue playing around with the adjustments but i am happy with this
so this is just a short and sweet tutorial so i'm going to go ahead and finish by exporting
the video so i'm going to go to export file export sorry file export and choose render video
and i'll save it to the desktop as aurora.mp4
if you just want it at the highest quality possible you can choose quicktime and choose
animation but if you want it in a way that you can share it as in as many places as possible
i would highly suggest h.264 which will make an mp4 file and that will work uh basically anywhere
uh we can leave the frame rate and the document size alone since we already cropped to 4k
but if you wanted to you could change those things in here
and we want the entire work area so all 119 frames so this is all good we can just click render
and let it export the finished video and that's it for this tutorial hopefully
it was helpful and now you know how to make a basic time lapse uh
using adobe photoshop until next time this has been nico carver clear skies