i'm working with a timelapse shot of icebergs. a frame was taken every hour over the course of a day. the camera was locked off and the settings kept the same all day. however obviously due to weather changes the shot varies in brightness and contrast and light etc every frame. i was wondering what are the best setting/effects to use to try and even this out. i have gone through it frame by frame to try and even it out but it doesn't look much better and it took ages and i've got lots of shots to do. is there a setting i can apply that will even out the shot?
Re: time lapse colour correction by david bogie on Jul 31, 2008 at 5:02:57 pm
Hire a Photoshop geek. There are may scripts in PS that can process your images quickly and accurately. It's all back magic to me, I hate Photoshop with a deep passion so I always pick up the phone and call a wonk. They say, "It was easy!" and I am happy to happy their invoice.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: "For crying out loud, read the freakin' manual."
Re: time lapse colour correction by Kevin Camp on Jul 31, 2008 at 5:42:19 pm
steve roberts had had a suggestion for trying to fix time lapse footage. you can read his thread here.
he used the echo effect to blend neighboring frames together to smooth the flicker some. you may be able to use other time effects too, timewarp and time blend may produce similar effects. his tip was specifically for a sunset shot, so obviously the footage was shot on the same day, so the differnces between frames was probably less than you are experiencing.
it would be easy to create a photoshop action for something like auto levels or auto curves, use that to create a batch operation and then perform the batch on a folder full of frames. if you have the more expensive version of photoshop cs3, you should be able to do this for a movie clip rather than an image sequence, but i've never tried it.
i do think that you will be hard pressed to color correct each frame and get them to look like the same lighting conditions... a sunny day will produce hard shadows and contrast that just won't be able to be reproduced on a cloudy day shot with diffuse light.
