I am trying to recover an old nighttime timelapse I shot using a Nikon D7000 with white balance set to "auto". I had thought that white balance was not encoded in RAW files, but the images have an inconsistent tint from shot to shot which creates a flicker effect that LRTimelapse is unable to fix.

If I open the files in Adobe Camera Raw and just click "done" (don't apply any changes), I can see that two adjacent images have different color temperature/tint settings by examining the sidecar XMP files in a text editor. But if I then update the temperature/tint to give both images the same value, the color shift improves but does not go completely away.

I used a exif editing utility to look at the files themselves. They are different in two parameters which don't appear to be editable: "WB_RBLevels" and "WB_GRGBLevels".

I'm assuming that shooting on "auto" caused some sort of color correction to be encoded in the NEF files which can't be removed in Adobe Camera Raw.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get rid of the color shift or otherwise get a reasonably acceptable result from this NEF sequence? I hate to abandon this shoot.

This post was last modified: 2022-04-03, 01:19 by Gunther.

Those old sensors were known for creating such slight tint shifts especially when pushed. If that's the issue, it's quite impossible to really remove them since there is no way to do it via xmp editing.
Your best option would be to just use a good amount of LRT Motion Blur when rendering, which will often smooth out such effects.
Give it a try.

thank you!