Deflicker Timelapse Software
Jinsheng wrote to share a great app for a quick and simple way to deflicker timelapse sequences. Unfortunately, it’s only available on Macs (sorry Windows users!) and perhaps one day a Windows version will exist. It appears to be a “last step” in post-processing of timelapse (before editing) because you need to work with non-RAW image sequences.
Jinsheng has definitely proven his deflicker concept (and app) works really well. What we would REALLY love to see is a Lightroom plugin that world work on Mac or Windows so we can keep all adjustments as metadata while we work with the native Raw files. Here’s what Jinsheng wrote:
I love time-lapse photography. I have taken day time and night time time-lapse, but avoided sunset and day to night fearing they may generate flickers and tremendous work fix them. Since I am quite good at programming and algorithms, I decided to solve the problem by myself. After long time trial and error, I finally made something that works really really good. I posted the app to Mac App Store. There are versions: free (renders up to 720p) and full (up to 8K). The apps are called “TLDF”.
There are two key features in TLDF: 1. Pixel level adjustment: Instead of globally changing the exposure for all the pixels by the same value, TLDF adjusts brightness of each pixel individually to optimize the flicker free effect for overall sequence. Most photo editing tools (Lightroom and plugins etc.) cannot do this. 2. Noise Reduction: Some of the flickers are caused by the noise. TLDF’s noise reduction algorithm will further reduce the flicker from time-lapse sequence and generate beautiful clean skies.
The workflow is simple. Just take all the pictures in any auto exposure mode and import the files to TLDF, which will generate a new sequence of de-flickered and de-noised files.
If you’re on a Mac and are interested in trying it, you can download the free version of the deflicker software in the Mac App Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=1152657562&mt=12
