Looking for advice on software for batch processing of images

I am hoping some of the many experts on this board can assist me. I use a Garmin Virb for taking time lapse photos when I out on drives and it works great except when I'm driving into the sun. The images are still clearly legible but very dark.

I am looking for a piece of software that I can use to automatically process large quantities of images to improve their quality so that if I do have a long trip where I'm driving into the sun (Dublin to Galway in the evening) that my shots wont be a loss.

Doing this manually on a one-by-one basis is not really an option as I am taking an image every 2 seconds

Does such software exist?

I am on Windows 8.1

Cosmo K

Adobe Lightroom.

Lightroom is designed to batch process large amounts of images and also has a very capable development module.

You can download a free 30 day trial version from Adobe. There are plenty of free tutorials on YouTube.

flyingsnail

Plus 1 for Lightroom.

Zillah

No no no be very careful with Lightroom.

Exposure changes are relative to each photo (what counts as "shadows" or "highlights", for example), so if you apply the exact same setting to multiple photos it will be expressed in different ways, which is catastrophic for timelapse: it introduces flickering into the final product.

I would recommend importing them as a jpeg stream into Adobe After Effects and treating it like a video.

Photoshop also has a batch processing facility, and while it is trickier to use than Lightroom I think exposure changes are objective rather than subjective.

I have to be honest, while I'm willing to spend a bit on software to assist me in this, I really can't sign up to a subscription licence

I'm looking at open source or cheaper alternatives in the meantime

Thanks for your help folks, at the very least you steered me in the right direction

Kenny Logins

Zillah wrote: »

No no no be very careful with Lightroom.

Exposure changes are relative to each photo (what counts as "shadows" or "highlights", for example), so if you apply the exact same setting to multiple photos it will be expressed in different ways, which is catastrophic for timelapse: it introduces flickering into the final product.

I would recommend importing them as a jpeg stream into Adobe After Effects and treating it like a video.

Photoshop also has a batch processing facility, and while it is trickier to use than Lightroom I think exposure changes are objective rather than subjective.

You could set all photos to "auto" exposure on import..?

LR Timelapse allows you to keyframe the Lightroom adjustments so they can fade/in out along with the scene.

http://lrtimelapse.com/

Kenny Logins

Deleted User wrote: »

I have to be honest, while I'm willing to spend a bit on software to assist me in this, I really can't sign up to a subscription licence

I'm looking at open source or cheaper alternatives in the meantime

Thanks for your help folks, at the very least you steered me in the right direction

Lightroom is also available standalone for about £95 or something.

inkedpt

You can try Gimp ... it's open source and someone has created a script to batch images. I've never tried it myself so my advice is, take a look first on how it works.

Paulw

You can also use Lightroom on a full 30-day free trial, before you decide if you want to buy or not.

frozenfrozen

Black Magic Design's DaVinci Resolve Lite! Colour grading software, absolutely perfect for this...

sheesh

infraview does a bit of this. there is a batch conversion/alteration http://www.irfanview.com/

It is small but has been around for years its not bad

Zillah

Kenny Logins wrote: »

You could set all photos to "auto" exposure on import..?

No I tried that. It treats each photo independently, so as your scene changes - even a tiny bit - it makes different decisions about how to make the adjustments, and when the images are played in sequence, what at first might have seemed to be subtle differences, turns into a flickering disaster.

I believe older versions of Lightroom used objective measurements so if you copy pasted settings from one to the whole sequence you'd probably be ok, but the more modern versions change their mind entirely depending on what photo it's considering.