Processing a day-to-night time-lapse sequence in Lightroom

- Once you've initialized those keyframes it's just a matter of handing off to either Lightroom or Bridge. I'm gonna switch to Lightroom for a moment but you've already seen both workflows. You can really use either at this point. I'll switch to Lightroom and go to my Library module. At this point, I just need to find the file. I'll click the Import button, go to my Drive, and choose the Class Exercise folder.

Troll down folder five and there's my day to night. I'm gonna import these but add them so they stay in their current location. The files are loaded in. Because there's a lot of files, it'll take about a minute to two to load in the files and their associated metadata from LRTimelapse. Once the files are successfully loaded you can process them inside of Lightroom. I'll choose to view any images that have a star rating and you see that all the keyframes appear.

Now, switch to the Develop module. I'm gonna apply an initial white balance here. In this case let's try Auto, let it guess. I'll quickly dial in the right exposure. Pulling down and recovering the highlights and a little pop in the Clarity and the Vibrance. That looks pretty good. I really don't need to use the gradiated filters here. I'll select all the next images and choose Sync and synchronize everything.

Go to image 2, the white balance is a little off as it starts to change time of day so I'll tweak that slightly. Let the Exposure get a bit darker. Let's start to recover some of the shadowy areas. Looks pretty good. Select that image and everything else and click Sync. Remember, we always sync the changes going forward so the images that come later begin to update. This one looks pretty close.

I'm just gonna make a slight change in the shadows, lifting those a bit further, letting the color temperature roll a little cooler, adding a little more Clarity, select it, go forward and Sync. And now it really starts to get to be dramatic. In this case, the lighting has really changed. So, I'm gonna let it re-white balance with an auto white balance.

It's startng to warm up as the sun sets. Let's lift the Exposure slightly but boost the Contrast. Select and go forward, Sync. Looks pretty good here. Just gonna lift those highlights a bit, bring the Exposure and the Shadows up, and a little more Vibrance as it gets later.

Good. Select, Sync, and finish this one out. Let's properly white balance here. We'll let it guess with an auto, not bad. Let's try Tungsten for nighttime. A little strong but I'll split the difference. There we go. The lights of the city are beginning to come on. We'll let the highlights bloom a little and really start to bring out the color.

Select, go forward, and Sync, and let's see how that finishes out. Not bad. Balance that out just a bit, lift the highlights, bring the blacks up slightly for the buildings as they light up at night. Select forward, Sync, and let's check those last two shots. Now too bad. Just a little saturated for my choice so we'll back down the Vibrance, lift the blacks a bit further so the buildings really become separated, that looks good.

Sync the last two images and that last one's pretty good. Just a little to saturated. We'll back off the Clarity and lift the Exposure slightly more. All right. Not too shabby. All those images have updated. At this point, go back to the Library view and choose the Grid. Make sure you turn off Filtering so you see all the images. You'll now want to select those images and choose Metadata, Save Metadata to Files.

This will overwrite the information and force the XMP to update. Let's let that go and update the files on disk. Once that's done we can return to LRTimelapse.