This post was last modified: 2014-05-24, 21:59 by aaronpriest.

I have a stitched panoramic timelapse sequence of TIFFs that I want to gradually change the white balance of. I saved the TIFFs as DNGs via Lightroom, initialized them and keyframed them with LRTimelapse, saved the .xmp data back, re-read the metadata with Lightroom, changed my white balance on the keyframes, reloaded them back into LRTimelapse where it sees the changes, set a transition, saved the .xmp data back again, reloaded again in Lightroom, and they all say Temp +12 and Tint -2. It does not save out the white balances changes. Any ideas?

Hi Aaron, personally didn't this workflow with converted Tiffs, but working with DNGs normally anymates the WB just fine. I'm currently on the Astromaster in LaPalma, will try it, when I'm back home. Could you try reproducing this with another sequence?

I had tried it several times before starting the thread, but I will try a new Lightroom catalog on a different drive to be sure.

Did you and Andre get to meet in La Palma? I think he is currently there.

So here is my experience: I save the TIFFs to DNGs with Lightroom 5.4 and the temp and tint are both 0 on the DNGs. I initialize them with LRTimelapse 3.3.1, set the keyframes, and save the .xmp data back. After reading the metadata again in Lightroom the temp is set to +12 and the tint to -2. I set them back to 0 on every frame, and adjust it to what I want on the keyframes. I reload in LRTimelapse where it sees the temp and tint changes and set transitions. The data looks good in the columns in LRTimelapse with the gradual change of white balance exactly as it should be. I save the .xmp data back and read it again in Lightroom, and the temp is back to +12 and the tint is -2 for every image, including the keyframes.

I looked at the .xmp files that LRTimelapse is creating. Near the top each of them says:

Code:

<crs:Temperature>5850</crs:Temperature>
<crs:Tint>8</crs:Tint>

And then towards the bottom of the file I see:

Code:

<crs:IncrementalTemperature>-99</crs:IncrementalTemperature>
<crs:IncrementalTint>0</crs:IncrementalTint>

The IncrementalTemperature is changing from -99 to 0 as I had set it in Lightroom with the keyframes, but Lightroom is not reading this back from the .xmp files I guess?

This is due to the two differet approaches to Whitebalance, that are used in Lightroom/ACR.
Tiff/JPG is "relative" (Incremental) Whitebalance, with defaults 0/0.
RAW is absolute WB values.

DNG ist treated as RAW by LRTimelapse, so if you embed a tiff in DNG, it will be still treated with absolute WB values by LRT, but Lightroom will expect the relative ones for the TIFF.

I will have to look into it, if I will be able to change that. Thanks for reporting!

Well that tip gave me an idea--and it works! I saved out JPEGs from the TIFFs, did all my normal LRTimelapse workflow on them (which does not create .XMPs but embeds data in the JPEGs), and then copied all the EXIF data from the JPEGs to the TIFFs via a batch command with ExifTool. When I re-read the TIFFs with Lightroom it saw all the changes, and it was far faster than dealing with .DNGs anyway!

I will see if I can add that support in one of the next versions.

Hi Aaron, I investigated the issue and found that it's a Lightroom Annoyance. As soon as it finds "Absolut" WB values in a XMP file, it will reset the relative ones to their defaults. Anyway - I found a way to distinguish the type of file that's embedded in the DNG and make sure that on initialization ony the needed type of WB will be created. Will come with the next update.

Cool, thanks! I take it TIFF support would still be quite difficult?