not able to do time lapse photography

[adriaan32000778d0ru]

Signed up this morning for lightroom and photoshop us dollar 9.19 monthly .It seems that there is no function in both to do time lapse photography . On the opening interface also no mention of lightroom classic ? Is this an entry level version with limited functions?

Barry South Africa

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[JohanElzenga]

The Photography Plan you subscribed to comes with Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, so make sure you install the correct version, which is Lightroom Classic. Lightroom Classic does not come with an 'out of the box' time lapse option however. There are third party plugins to help you make a time lapse, so use Google to find them and a good tutorial.

[johnrellis]

Also, Photoshop lets you build videos from sequences of stills (frames) -- google for tutorials on how to do it.  I use that functionality about once a year but either never remember the details or the details have changed since the last time I used it, so I always end up looking for a current recipe.

[Conrad_C]

On the opening interface also no mention of lightroom classic ? Is this an entry level version with limited functions?

By @adriaan32000778d0ru

The Photography Plan is not limited and has the full professional feature set. If you mean you are looking for Lightroom Classic in the Photography Plan, it is definitely part of it. Adobe prefers to promote cloud-centric Lightroom, so Lightroom Classic is not up front on the sales page. But if you subscribe to the Photography Plan, the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app/installer does list Lightroom Classic as an application you can install.

However, these applications don’t do everything, and one of the things they do not directly support is time-lapse photography. There is no built-in feature supporting time-lapse photography in Lightroom Classic or Photoshop. It is possible to “hack” the Lightroom Classic slide show feature to export a sort of time lapse video, but the results are basic and might not meet your needs.

A popular way to do a time lapse is to import the still frames into a video application and have it automatically merge them into a single video. Basic utilities can do this.

For better results, import non-raw still frames into a video editing application that lets you do the above but also apply adjustments that can vary over time; for example, to level out white balance changes during a time lapse sequence. Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects can do this.

If you want the best time lapse results, use an application that specializes in time lapse processing. There are several of these, but if you like working in Lightroom Classic and want a time-lapse to preserve as much camera raw image quality as possible (e.g. when a time lapse covers a large exposure range), then consider LRTimelapse (paid non-subscription software). It’s specifically designed to integrate with Lightroom Classic metadata at the raw level, and the power of this is that it can vary Lightroom Classic options (such as Exposure and White Balance, Noise Reduction, or a masked adjustment like Linear Gradient) over time for individual camera raw still frames, using keyframes. Also, it can automatically eliminate time-lapse exposure flicker between frames, which video applications typically can’t do.

[johnrellis]

"There is no built-in feature supporting time-lapse photography in  ... Photoshop."

There are plenty of tutorials showing how to use Photoshop to make timelapse videos with no add-ons:

https://www.google.com/search?q=timelapse+in+photoshop&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS1064US1064&oq=timelapse+in+ph...

[Conrad_C]

Ah, I stand corrected! 🙂 I forgot that Photoshop can merge a folder of stills into a video timeline too.

Still, it depends on requirements…Photoshop will be fine for simple time lapses, but if adriaan32000778d0ru has tighter requirements regarding animation or final video file specs, other software may still be required. Also, the way Photoshop uses computer resources for video playback is not as efficient as in current video editing applications, so if the time lapse is so large that it starts to bog down, that will be another reason to consider other software that can achieve playback closer to real time.

[Jao vdL]

Photoshop's features for timelapses are absolutely outstanding. You can easily add pans and zooms and any kind of animation you want, do all kinds of compositing in the video layers and you get far higher quality output than anything you can do with lightroom plugins or most other software. You can even integrate the video with all kinds of 3D elements. The video integrates into Premiere or After Effects effortlessly. It's pretty amazing how unknown the video features are in Photoshop but it really is quite a full featured application for timelapses. As with anything Photoshop though it is not trivial to learn how to use it all and many might be better off with dedicated applications.

[Ian Lyons]

Quietly @Jao vdL If you speak too highly of this feature, the Photoshop team may take it out and replace it with something much less useful 😞

[Jao vdL]

Haha. Yeah that is unfortunately a very real possibility