Timelapse+ Studio: A fantastic Lightroom plug-in for time-lapse creators
Updated: May 20, 2023
Timelapse+ Studio is an impressive plug-in for Lightroom that allows you to quickly edit hundreds of files prior to assembling them into a video. This plug-in was built specifically for time-lapse creators and is extremely simple to use.
We have a coupon code at the end of this post if you wish to purchase this plug-in. This is a quick and honest review and we are not affiliated with the company.
On June 28, 2019, we uploaded a video and wrote a tutorial on our website showing you how to put together several photos into a time-lapse video, using Lightroom and any basic video editing software.
Shortly after making this tutorial, we wondered if there was a way to make this whole process faster and easier. We originally tried looking up if there was any way to export the time-lapse video straight out of Lightroom, but we were unable to find anything.
We instead stumbled upon a plug-in for Lightroom that is dedicated to time-lapses, called Timelapse+ Studio. We never tried any plug-in in the past, mostly because we didn't really want to learn how to install and use them, but we quickly changed our mind when we realized how easy it was to implement.
A little bit hesitant, we read through the home page and saw that one of our favorite time-lapse photographers, Adrien Mauduit, uses this plug-in regularly for his videos! You can check out Adrien's incredible work HERE.
Below you can see the few steps we go through from installing the plug-in to exporting all the edited files.
Installing the Plugin
To install any Lightroom plug-in, including Timelapse+ Studio, do the following:
Launch Lightroom
Go to File > Plug-in Manager
Select "Add" near the bottom left
Find the plug-in file in your computer and click on "Add plug-in"
Click on "Done" and… that's it!
We did not change any of the default features, and you can mess with that later if you want to tweak anything, in our case, the default options are perfectly fine.
Using the Plugin
Timelapse+ Studio helps you compile and edit all your time-lapse data in 3 quick steps. There are actually 4 steps listed in the plug-in but the last one is just an added extra and you don't need to do any "work" after step 3.
Here are each of these steps:
Step 1 - Group Photos by Time-lapse
No matter if your Lightroom library is full of random pictures, the plug in will collect all the time-lapse files and "group" them together, by individual time-lapse.
We were very impressed by this because if you watched our video, you can see that our library was very chaotic and a bunch of photos from Dalia's graduation day were mixed within the time-lapse files.
This first step successfully disregarded these random images and grouped our time-lapse photos together in seconds.
Step 2 - Auto-Create Keyframes
This second step looks for changes in lighting, angles, and others slight changes when comparing all the data. It then marks a few images as "keyframes".
When going to the Develop tab to edit our pictures, only the keyframes are visible, those are the only ones we need to worry about!
This will allow us to edit just a couple of pictures (the keyframes) and the software will later blend our settings to all the other files so there will not be any difference of highlights, shadows or saturation throughout the entire time-lapse.
Step 3 - Blend Settings Between Keyframes
Like we just mentioned in Step 2, this third step will blend all our files together in relation to the settings we changed for our keyframes and will make sure everything is blended smoothly. It is interesting to go through each image and see how the settings slightly differ for each.
Step 4 - Preview Time-Lapse
Lastly, here comes the fun part! This is not mandatory, but it sure is an awesome addition!
We can preview our time-lapse, without having to open a video editor. This is really helpful if you want to see what to expect, and also to make sure that you didn't forget to remove any bad frame in there.
And you're done! We now just have to export it all and transform these into a video using any video editing software!
You can see how we do that in our 90 second tutorial both on our Youtube channel and on our website.
If you would like to purchase this plug-in, you can do so HERE.
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