This post was last modified: 2014-10-07, 15:00 by chasg.

Hi All,

While editing a time-lapse, I'm having real problems with some frames inexplicably looking different from others frames located before and after the problem frames (note: this is definitely not flickering). I'm editing raws in Lightroom.

The scene of this time-lapse looks up a wide river towards an urban area, and it's a day-to-night holy grail sequence (and edited it in LRT accordingly). The river takes up the bottom half of the scene, and the problem only happens when a boat/ferry is prominent in the foreground.

Whenever a boat is in the foreground of a frame, the look of the photo is different (slightly, though obviously), from the frames before. The weird part is: the numbers are exactly the same in Lightroom's interface, no change of any editing parameter from shot to shot, even though the look of the photos is different. The sequence returns to the "normal" look after the boat is no longer prominent in the shot.

To be absolutely clear: this problem only happens when a boat is taking up a large area of the foreground. This is not flicker.

Of course, the camera was on fully manual when shooting, and the issue is not related to the ambient light (the sequence in question was during an overcast day, the light was constant). I know that the sequence should be seamless (no sudden jumps in editing values from frame to frame), because if I remove every Lightroom edit from all of the photos (with boat and without boat), the exposure values are the same, and the series looks seamless. It's only when the LRT edits are applied that I have this problem.

When I first noticed it, I figured there was a screw up somewhere, and so I sync'ed the edits of the "before-boat" shots to the "with-boat" shots, making sure that every possible value was being synchronised (yes, even exposure). This should have made them look the same, but the boat shots still looked different.

I'm very confused. It's almost like LR is applying editing values but not showing what they are in its interface.

I can't figure out what LRT has done, and I'm at a loss as to how to avoid these errors. I actually struggled to fix them manually in Lightroom, as the differences seem to be numerous, including what seems to be: darks, lights, shadows, highlights, clarity and temperature, if not circular and linear gradients, though it's very hard to tell (I've been a photo retoucher for over a decade, so I assure you it's not a lack of familiarity with Lightroom that is at issue :-)

I'm using Lightroom 5.3 on a Mac running OSX 10.9.4, and LRT is version 3.4. The frames were taken 20 seconds apart on an overcast day. Camera was a Nikon D3S with a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens mounted (shots were taken at 82mm, and the camera was securely locked down).

Can anyone help?

Cheers!

Chas

If you synched all values in LR and still get that effect, then there is only one remaining explanation: Lightroom applies some parameters depending on the overall brightness or content of the images. So the blacks slider or clarity for example will behave differently then.
Try initializing the sequence in LRT and only apply the Holy Grail Wizard to level exposure. Then render. Check if the effect is gone.
You can then add the 2nd layer of editing but make sure to not edit to "strong", especially Blacks, Whites, Highlights, Shadows, Clarity.

Hi Gunther, thanks for the reply.

You must be correct, LR is applying parameters that I can't see or control. I've confirmed the problem though.

I've abandoned the time-lapse that was causing me problems (I'm planning to go back to it, eventually), but I'm working on another that also has boats running up and down the river. I've got the same issue: when a boat moves into shot and starts taking up a lot of area (about 1/8, going up to 1/4 as it gets closer to the camera), part of the scene's edits start to change, even though the parameter values don't.

I've actually isolated it in this case to one of the graduated filters (I'm sure of it). The amount the boats take of the shot is directly related to the amount the graduated filter differs from what it should be. The graduated filter's numbers definitely do not change from shot to shot, even though it itself is causing a change in the image.

One thing confuses me: why haven't I read anything about this anywhere else? You've shot far more time lapses than I have, have you encountered this behaviour in Lightroom yourself?

If I can't solve this problem, then it's going to be an endlessly frustrating process editing timelapses, as I struggle to match frames with other frames that should already match! It's taking hours of extra work, and I'm still not managing to get exact matches :-(

I wonder if editing via Bridge and ACR would avoid the problem? (I'll miss the very nice integration of LRT with LR though).

Just discovered something very interesting!

I cloned out the boat in the shot, and then synchronised the graduated filter from a "non-boat" shot with the shot out of which I cloned the boat. The graduated filter synced perfectly, problem solved, until...

I then deleted the cloning (so that the boat showed up again). The graduated filter immediately went back to its original, incorrect, state: far too light (but the actual values did not change). Adjusting the opacity of the clone had a direct relationship to how the graduated filter behaved (less opacity, the more the graduated filter went "wrong").

I don't know what this means, but it's interesting to see that, when the visual change was gone (the boat removed from the shot), the out-of-whack parameters acted as they should.

Oh, and I tried Bridge, it didn't solve the problem. It's got to be ACR (Adobe Camera Raw), which underlies Lightroom as well.

Desperate to find the underlying cause, so I can turn it off!

Sorry, I've never experienced that and it's hard for me to judge what's going on without being able to see the sequence and what you are doing.
No one has ever reported an issue like that as well, to be honest.

ACR/Bridge and Lightroom share exactly the same develop engine.

Maybe you could put together a short sequence of only 2 or 3 images as a testing scenario that you could send me so that I could try to reproduce this, but I'd need a step by step instruction then what to do, to get the effect you are talking about.

PS: are you sure that you are only using the Gradients that LRTimelapse created on initialization and not any new ones?

Hi Gunther,

Well, I've confirmed it: Lightroom applies some of its edits (shadows, highlights, whites, blacks and Clarity) in a non-linear manner, depending on the content of the image. This could be a problem for us time-lapse shooters (under certain conditions).

I should note that LRTimelapse has nothing to do with this issue, it's a Lightroom "feature" that's at the root of the problem.

I posted my problem in the Adobe Lightroom forums, and got an answer that confirmed our speculations that LR was doing something on its own (skip to Jao vdL's reply to my original query):

https://forums.adobe.com/message/6792197#6792197

The issue won't affect any shoot where the tones don't change suddenly (even clouds going by are ok). In my case, over only three frames a big boat, made up of dark tones, came in and took up a relatively large amount of space (in place of some light-toned water that was in the frame before). LR then took it upon itself to balance the tones in the image. Thus my sky suddenly lightening when no editing values had changed.

Remember: I'd applied many edits to my images before this problem showed up (including the "danger" edits mentioned in the Adobe LR forums thread: shadows, highlights, whites, blacks and clarity, much clarity!). If not a lot of work is done with these particular sliders, then the problem doesn't show up.

In the thread in the Adobe LR forums, I do detail a workaround for the problem, but it involves both LR and PShop, and compositing two frames together. A pain, but it'll get me back to work making my time-lapses, and that's all I want at the moment.

And to address your last reply to me:

1) I'd be happy to put up some raw files for you to test, if you'd still like to. I've confirmed the behaviour in two different time-lapse sequences, on two different machines
2) thanks for confirming that ACR and LR use the same develop engine
3) and I definitely am not creating any more gradients other than the three that LRT does (it sure would be nice if we could! :-)

Cheers!

Chas

The fact that some LR edits are non linear is long known and not a surprise to me. In 99% of all time lapse sequences you can just solve it by not editing too heavily. Mostly objects don't just "appear" because we work with longer exposures, motion blur etc. A ship in one frame an no ship in the next one doesn't give a nice sequence anyway.
So in practical use it's important to know about the behavior of those tools, but they are normally no deal breaker for time lapse photography.

Hi Gunther,

I fear I'm sensing some irritation, I apologise for that, I hope I haven't come off as aggressive or critical of you or LRT (I did suspect it was originally an LRT issue when this first happened, because I'd never noted this behaviour in LR before, but hope I've made it clear that it's LR's issue, not LRT's). LRT is a fantastic program, and I've praised it in every forum I been on lately (and in person, to several other photogs).

The edits I'm applying are not overly extreme, imho (nothing more than the scene calls for). If I was editing just single shots (for printing), I'd take them into Photoshop and use more subtle and powerful techniques, like restricted luminance masks, to do the same thing, but that'd be far more work than it'd be worth for time-lapses of 600-1200 frames :-)

I agree that having objects just appear and disappear doesn't make for a good time-lapse. The boats in question move through shot over 10-15 frames, and at 25fps look sufficiently smooth for the viewer to understand their motion. It's only when they get close to the camera, and start to take up a certain portion of the frame, that the non-linear problem that is causing me so much grief starts happening in Lightroom.

I'm going to point you to an example of a boat moving into frame, so you can see why I edited the way I did: the scene is quite low in contrast (there was a lot of haze in the air). Note: from shot 5 to 6, the exposure increased from 2.0 seconds to 2.5 seconds, so I did a "Match Total Exposures" for the rest of the sequence, but I've confirmed that this has nothing to do with the problem I'm dealing with.

These are the unedited shots, note how the bright part of the sky stays the same from shot to shot (it's a low contrast scene, it really needs some work to bring out all the detail).

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qym8hy88hmyyp...rZ3ga?dl=0

These are the edited shots, each has had exactly the same done to it (I don't think that these look too extreme, especially for 4K video):
a) global clarity +24, blacks +25 (I wanted to keep the exposure down so as to not blow out the city lights, so I had to bring up the blacks in post)
b) two gradients: one for the sky, drawn up from the bridge about 1/3 of the way (exposure -10, clarity +48 to bring out the edges of the clouds), second for the water, drawn down from the bridge to the bottom of its shadow (exposure +.20, clarity +48).
Please note frames 7-10, the sky gets progressively lighter as the tones of the boat take up more of the photo, and in frame 11 (when the boat is out of frame), the sky goes back to where it should be.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/98pbwtwam34ee...x_Oma?dl=0

And these are the raws (still uploading as I write this), just in case you'd like to check my results. As I'm sure you know, you just need to apply the edits as I've described them above:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r91rd7pn8kc4p...V9sfa?dl=0

I know you haven't encountered this issue in Lightroom, and I'm quite happy to hear that for you (you've done beautiful work in some amazing places, all the while writing and updating LRT, I'm really impressed). My shooting schedule is going to be a lot of scenes like the one I've pointed you to, LRTimelapse is a huge help in getting the job done (most of mine have been Holy Grail TLs so far), but in order to continue, I've needed a bit of extra help from you (and a few people in other forums). Worst case: I figure I can solve the problem with a combo of Lightroom and Photoshop for each problem frame in any series. It'll add 1-2 hours of work per time-lapse, I think, but it has to be done.

Hopefully none of your other LRT users ever encounter this issue, but if they do, perhaps this discussion will help them.

I should note that I've gotten some advice (I'm holding several conversations at once, in three forums), to move to an earlier Process Version for Lightroom, which is less adaptive than the one that is native to Lightroom 5. It may go a long way to solving my problem, fingers are crossed.

Cheers!

Chas