(2013-04-23, 12:34)Fourth Dimension Wrote: I have tried my first sunset with LRTimelapse following the holy grail method. I matched the exposure in lightroom between the holy grail key points. I get these jumps in brightness of the sun, why is this and how can I smooth these out? Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance.
https://vimeo.com/64626372
As the sun comes down the scene gets darker so you increase the exposure to compensate (it looks like you are doing this 1 stop at a time). Since sunsets are quite colourful and the sun is bright you often find that a correctly exposed sunset image results in clipped highlights. The clipping will be most apparent when you make your exposure jump. Once you have captured a sequence of RAW files like this there is nothing you can do to correct it. If you shot in jpeg (you didnt say what format you were shooting in but I assume it was RAW) then this problem will be totally unavoidable with sunsets no matter what you do because of the increased clipping.
In future there are a number of things you can do:
- Shoot RAW if you weren't already
- Use smaller jumps in exposure. Most cameras can do 1/3rd of a stop these days. This will make the effect significantly less obvious and is, in my opinion, the first thing you shout try.
- Change the exposure - underexposing the images further, but processing them brighter should reduce the appearance of this effect.
- Reduce saturation and contrast - If you over saturate or add too much contrast in Lightroom it will exagerrate the clipping problem. Low contrast, low saturation processing will result in less clipping.
- Shoot at a wider focal length - it goes without saying that the bigger the sun is in the image the more obvious this effect could be
- Exposure bracket - create 3 identical sequences at different exposures and crossfade between then - this hopefully wont be necessary!
Alex