LRTimelapse Forum

I'm new to LRTimelapse and Lightroom. I love them both! Here is my question:

I've shot several sunrise and sunset timelapses so far. I'm figuring out color grading and each time I "render video" the result looks a little better. But my biggest problem is how to post-process the shots taken when it was nighttime. When I look at the raw files out of the camera, it's hard to tell the difference between night and day. I want the final video to give a strong feeling of "after dark," without making the frame completely dark. Can anyone give me some pointers?

Here is an early effort I did. This link should be good for a couple weeks. It's obviously not show quality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wh_rgccbBg

Thank you for a great product. I look forward to any advice from the community.

You definitely should keyframe the exposure on holy grail keyframes and make the night images darker. Additionally you can also keyframe white balance and saturation to get a more distinct difference between night and day.

Thanks, Gunther. I'll try those idea and let you know how it works out. I did indeed have keyframes and the settings were different between day and night. But I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the different settings should be, both as a matter of simple good technique, and additionally what kind of style or artistry should be applied on top of that.

I ended up taking the night scenes down by around 2.5 stops in lightroom. Although I have not had any really good sunsets or sunrises to photograph so far, I was able to find some color and make an interesting sequence. Here is my best effort so far:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9heYePYXkTs

This was a Canon 70 d, ISO 160, f2.8, 10 second interval provided by Magic Lantern. I just used aperture priority nothing fancy beyond that.

Well done!