 Today's video is sponsored by Squarespace. Hey everyone, Nico Carver here. Today the topic is going to be astro timelapses, which is something I really love shooting, but for some reason have never made a tutorial video on. And so the way to shoot a timelapse is really simple. It's just like shooting astrophotography, deep sky astrophotography, untracked, where you set up your camera on a tripod, you focus on the night sky, you set it up to take a sequence of photos and you let it go. The only difference with doing untracked, you know, deep sky astrophotography and timelapse astrophotography is with deep sky you're going to re-center the object every so often. With timelapse you don't re-center. You just let it go for as long as you can. Hours is optimal. Because what happens with timelapse photography is it compresses that time way down because you're going to show the frames back at 30 frames per second. But each frame is probably like 15 seconds long because you do it with a wide-angle lens. And there's all kinds of great objects to shoot with timelapse. You know, I'm going to show a few here that are really classic ones, the Milky Way and clouds. You know, we always get clouds, but they can actually be an interesting part of a timelapse. The Comet Neowise last summer, was that last summer? Two summers ago, I think. And the Aurora. That's the one I'll show in this tutorial is shooting the Aurora, which I shot in Iceland a number of years ago now. It's actually really how I got started with all of this. And so in this video, what I'm going to be showing you is not the shooting part because that's pretty simple. Just focus on the night sky, take as many photos in a row as you can with like an intervalometer or a timer. The part that a lot of people don't know is how do I take all of those raw photos and turn them into the finished video. And so I'm going to show you how to do that in Adobe Photoshop. It's sort of a hidden feature of Photoshop. And it's one that I think is really cool. But before we get into that, let me tell you about today's sponsor, which is Squarespace. So I was really excited when Squarespace reached out to sponsor this video and then the next three after this one because I'd been wanting to revamp and do something with nicocarver.com for years now. But I had just been putting it off, putting it off because I knew how much time it took to code websites. And especially for me, because I'm sort of a perfectionist, we're like the look of it all. But I literally put this together in just about 20 minutes this afternoon with Squarespace. And you can see it was made with Squarespace. This is just using their drag and drop template builder. It makes a really nice professional portfolio that is fully customizable. And it's a responsive design. So it looks good on the mobile phone or on a desktop. And it allows me to just showcase my photography in a really beautiful way. I can choose how much space I want between the photos. I can choose how I want the grid layout to look. All of that is completely customizable with their software and very easy to do without any knowledge of how websites work. You could do this. It's a really cool tool with different themes. And it allowed me to do something I've wanted to do for a while now, which is showcase some of my work outside of astrophotography as well. So over the next series of videos, I'm going to be continuing to build this out and show you more tools that you get with Squarespace. So I won't spoil it all right now. But I just did want to show you this, you know, I've built contact forms in the past with JavaScript and trying to build like spam protection into them. Squarespace takes care of all of that. And it's just built into the tool. You don't have to worry about plugins or anything weird. It's just there. So I think this is a really, really good website builder that will appeal to photographers and astrophotographers. So if you need a place to showcase your work with your own domain name, check out Squarespace, go to squarespace.com slash Nebula photos to get a 14 day free trial. And then after the free trial is up, if you want to continue and purchase, you know, the service, it's 10% off with the code Nebula photos. All right, let's jump in now into time lapse with Photoshop. So the first thing you're going to do after you've shot all of your photos that are going to go into the time lapse are put them all into a folder. So transfer them off your SD card somewhere on your computer or on some kind of hard drive. So you can see all of my raw files are here. I'm going to select them all by pressing command a because I'm on Mac, it would be control a on Windows and then double click. Okay, and you may already know this if you're Photoshop user, but when you open a raw file into Photoshop, it actually opens it up into this helper application called camera Adobe camera raw, which is very similar in in a lot of ways to Lightroom Lightroom is sort of like Adobe camera raw but for batch editing in a more serious way, you can do a lot more with batch editing, but almost all of the same kind of tools that are in Lightroom are in Adobe camera raw just in different places. Anyways, I'm going to do something just very simple in here. And with time lapse, I recommend keeping it pretty simple just sort of using the basic parameters here, not delving too much into selective adjustments or anything like that, because things can go a little bit wonky there. All I'm going to do is because I shot this at I think too, too low an ISO, I'm going to raise up my black level. So I'm just going to take it from zero, raise it all the way up to plus 100. So you can actually see the foreground. And then I'm going to copy that adjustment to all of the photos in the sequence here. So I'm just going to click down here, press Command A, it would be Control A on Windows and click the synchronize button, which is this button right here. So here's the first picture in the sequence. I'm going to click the synchronize button. And you can see there's a bunch of different things that can synchronize. The only one we're really interested in is blacks, but we don't have to worry about the other ones since we didn't touch them and click OK. And you can see what happened there is it synchronized that black level adjustment across all of the different photos in the sequence. And you can see just in 30 seconds, the rora is moving there as I sort of just go between these three photos. Next thing we're going to do is export all of the photos in the sequence. So we don't want to click open down here because that would open up all 100 and whatever photos into Photoshop and be a big mess. What we want to do is go up here to the upper right of the window and find this little export button. It says convert and save selected images. Oh, and we first want to select them all. So let's press Command A or Control A again. There we go. And now I want to convert and save all of these images. And I don't want to save them in the same location. I want to save in a new location. I'm going to click here to this folder that I already created called Aurora dash tips on the desktop and click select. And I can leave the rest of this all alone. Here file naming that's sort of interesting like if you found that you had to remove some of the frames because there was a problem with them. And then there was a gap in the numbering. You might want to mess around with this and actually give it a new name like you could say frame, oops, frame plus a five digit serial number. And then it would rename all of the the files in your sequence sequentially because you that's the key thing is you want all of your files to be sequential with no gaps for Photoshop to work best. But I'm just going to do the document name because I don't think there's any gaps in my sequence. Okay, so let's go ahead and click save. And you can see that the window doesn't go away right away. That's because it's actually saving off all of the files. And so you can see down here the progress it's making 96 remaining. Now this is just a short sequence because I wanted to, you know, not have it drag on too long. And I'm not going to wait on this video for them all to save off because it does take a little while. So I'll just cut and we'll pick back up when this is all saved off. Okay, so it is now finished. You can see all of my tiff files here in this new folder. Let's go back to Photoshop and click open. And I'm going to go to my desktop, click Aurora dot dash tiffs, click on the first tiff in the folder. And then this is very important. This is the magic thing. See right down here, you'll see this little box that says open as image sequence when you hover over it. You want to click that box. So again, the order of operations here is go to your folder of tiffs, click on the first tiff file, then click the little checkbox next to image sequence, then click open. And the next thing that will happen is Photoshop will ask you what frame rate you want to use. And so you can use a custom frame rate, you can use one of the standards like 60 or 30 or 24. I'm going to for this sequence use 15. This is a very short sequence. I didn't capture it long enough. And so to get a reasonable length for the time lapse like over five seconds long, I'm going to use 15 frames per second. But normally for a very smooth time lapse, I like to use at least 24 frames per second. So let's click okay. And it opens into Photoshop. And it looks just like, you know, on the base on the canvas, a single Photoshop image. But if we look over here in the layers panel, you can see there's this little film strip icon. And it's in this thing called video group one. So we know something's going on. But we have to turn on a key panel to actually get control over our time lapse. And that key panel is under the window menu. And it's the timeline panel. So this is an alphabetical list of all the different panels you can open up in Photoshop, we're going to open up the timeline panel. And there we go. And if it opens up, you know, too large on your screen, just shrink it down here like this, we can add audio tracks right here. So you can click add audio from this little music icon. And if you wanted to, you could add audio right here in Photoshop. I know this is probably blowing some people's minds that Photoshop has like a full video editor. And there is a bunch of stuff you can do in here that I'm not going to go over everything. But one key thing that I want to show you is that all of Photoshop's tools and adjustment layers are still available to you here as a video. So this gets really interesting because you know, there definitely are other tools for making time lapses. But I don't know of any that are as flexible and let you do as much image processing on the time laps as Photoshop will. So I can just, you know, click a curves adjustment layer here and I can brighten up my whole video. So it's really, really nice to just be able to, you know, edit this as I would a single photo, but it's actually editing the entire time lapse. And so, you know, you can add saturation, you can play around with this. It's, I think with time lapse video, it's easy to go overboard with the processing. So I always sort of, you know, go subtle. Another thing we can do right here is this is a fairly heavy time lapse. And by that, I mean every frame in this time lapse is a 16-bit TIF that's 6,000 pixels wide, something like that. So we could go ahead and crop it or change the image size and it will apply to the entire time lapse. So I'm just going to crop to a 16 by 9, like so. And then I'm going to also resize it down to, so right now it's like 5,500 pixels wide. I'm going to resize it to 4K, which is the standard video size. So I'm going to type in 3840. That's the 4K size, 3840 by 2160. Okay. It says transforming a video layer requires converting it into a smart object layer. That's fine. Click convert. Okay. And then I'm sure what a lot of you are wondering is, well, how do we actually see it as a video? You have this video timeline down here. Can we just play it back? And the answer is yes. But if we just hit play here, it's going to be painfully slow. It's not going to play back in real time. And the reason for that is because Photoshop hasn't yet saved every image in the video to a memory buffer. Once it does that, once it's rendered out every frame in the video, then it can play back in real time. But until it does that, it will play back very, very slow. It's playing back at less than one frame per second here. The faster your graphics card, I think the faster this whole rendering thing will happen. But on my 10-year-old MacBook here, it's pretty slow. So I'm going to let it render the entire time lapse sequence. And then we can watch it back in real time together and decide if this is ready to export. Okay. And it's done rendering. So let's play it back now and see how it looks. I love that. I love when it right after the big sort of explosion in light, this pink streamer comes off right there. Looks so cool. Anyways, so at this point, to continue with the tutorial, if you run happy at all with how it looked, after seeing it in motion, you could continue playing around with the adjustments. But I am happy with this. So this is just a short and sweet tutorial. So I'm going to go ahead and finish by exporting the video. So I'm going to go to export, file export, sorry, file export and choose render video. And I'll save it to the desktop as aurora.mp4. If you just want it at the highest quality possible, you can choose quick time and choose animation. But if you want it in a way that you can share it in as many places as possible, I would highly suggest h.264, which will make an mp4 file. And that will work basically anywhere. We can leave the frame rate and the document size alone since we already cropped to 4k. But if you wanted to, you could change those things in here. And we want the entire work area, so all 119 frames. So this is all good. We can just click render and let it export the finished video. And that's it for this tutorial. Hopefully it was helpful. And now you know how to make a basic time lapse using Adobe Photoshop. Until next time, this has been Niko Carver, Clear Skies.