How To Crush a FOOD STYLING Time Lapse

Hey, what's up everyone? How's it going? I hope you're having a great week so far. In today's video, I'm going to show you how to do a really amazing food styling time-lapse video. Now, this is something that I love to create for my clients. It's really simple to do. You start with the empty table, you show off all those little styling details, all the way to the final photograph. And in the end, you have a really cool time-lapse video. Okay, so making a food styling time-lapse is really, really simple. It's the same as any other time-lapse that you would go and make. You take a bunch of photos and then you make each photo a frame in Premiere at 24 frames per second. And that 45 minutes to an hour of arranging prompts around the table and styling that recipe gets broken down into a couple of seconds into one really fantastic clip like this one. To do this, it's really not any more difficult than taking a photo with every single move or adjustment that you make on the table here during the entire styling process. But it is really important to first find the edges of your frame because remember, this is going to be a video clip at 16 by 9, so you want to make sure you don't crop off anything that's really important to your story. Now for me, personally, I like to start off with placing the camera on video mode because the LCD screen already places that crop there for you. So I know where not to place my important stuff. But now that I have my edges all mapped out, I got my camera set up, I got my light set up too as well. It's hanging off there to the top left. It's looking really good. I got an empty table, so it's time to start making images. Okay, I just want to go over some of the props that I have for my shoot today. I got a couple of wooden cutting boards, a lighter one and this darker one. We'll see which one works best. I got a nice wooden bowl. I think I'll be using this for salsa. A nice little jar here. I think this will be for the sauce. Another little ceramic ramekin, also in lighter color like brown. So I'm going for high key, so you can see I'm choosing kind of lighter props. I got some taco holders and some nice beer here because for me, cervezas and tacos go hand in hand. As for the composition of this photo, I'm going to be placing the cutting board pretty much dead center within the frame. Then I think next up is the holders and I'll place these on top of the cutting board here. But maybe I'll angle them in so the light is shining through the shell and I get these nice diagonal lines when my tacos are ready. Then maybe I'll place some cilantro right here on the right hand side where all these prompts are and some fresh cut jalapenos right here in the negative space. And as far as these beers go, I think I'm going to place one maybe right there. And I'll place another one right here. And one here on the cutting board. And that forms a nice triangle that kind of cuts through my subject there. And I think for these other props, I'll place one right here and my salsa bowl I'll place on this side of the frame with the spoon pointing in there to the food. And for the sauce, maybe I'll place that right about here. And now I have two triangles that cut through my food. However, once I get my tacos down here on the table, I'll definitely sort out this bowl of salsa and this glass jar filled with sauce. I usually find that once the food is on the table, everything changes just a little bit because the food might be larger or smaller than you originally envisioned. If I was on a real shoot, I would get all of this ready while the food was cooking or at least right before it came out. That way, when the food does come out, I'm ready to get jamming or at least I can quickly break it down and start from there. But now that I have this composition all kind of mapped out in my mind, I can get ready on this food styling time-lapse. All right, let's jump into the computer and put this all together. So when I start to edit a time-lapse, I'm actually only doing the correction on a single image. And I want to make sure that I pick an image that represents the vast majority of the images in the time-lapse. I don't want to just pick the very first image or the very last image of the time-lapse. I want to pick an image that has all the important stuff because the crop, the color correction, all of that stuff is going to be synced across the board. Okay, so this is the image that I'm going to be doing my corrections on. And right off the bat, I can see I totally messed up the exposure. I mean, it's completely blown out. I don't know why I didn't catch that right off the bat. I'm going to blame it on shooting photos and trying to do a video at the same time. I mean, I got to have something to blame it on, right? Thankfully, I was shooting in RAW, so I think I could completely bring this back. I mean, always shoot RAW, but this brings up a good point. Typically, I would skip the Lightroom process completely and just jump straight into Premiere and do my color correction there because usually I'm trying to match my B-roll with other video clips that I've taken to make the entire color correction for the video. But because this is a standalone piece and the color correction is going to be so involved, for me, it's just simpler to do it in Lightroom. Okay, first up, I'm going to jump into the basic panel here. This image is a little bit warm for me. I tend to like my images on the cooler tone. So I'm going to be dropping this white balance down here to around 4,800, maybe 4,700-ish. I mean, that looks pretty good. It just makes my whites white again, and for me, cannons shoot a little bit warm anyways. All right, moving on down, I'm going to just pop in a general plus 20 on the contrast there. Now, that looks good, and I'm going to skip over the exposure slider to the highlight slider here and try to bring back this blown out bit in the corners and on these tortillas up here. So I'm going to move it to maybe around, I don't know, plus 70 looks nice, and I'll cycle the before and after here. And you can really just see how much of a difference that makes. I mean, it really does wonders in bringing back the detail on the top of that beer cap and the table there and in these tortillas as well. I mean, it's pretty cool. All right, so I have this little area of jalapenos right here that's getting a little bit dark. So I'm just going to increase this shadow slider up a little bit, that just helps brighten that area up as well as the shadows on the inside of the tacos, and we can just get a better look at the food. Now, maybe I'll just do a quick minus 20, plus 20 on the whites and blacks. I'll scroll down and add some clarity to the image. I'll dehaze it a bit and add some vibrance, and then maybe just take a smidge away from the saturation. And I'll cycle the before and after, and it's just, you know, a huge difference. I mean, before, this table was washed out, almost white, and those highlights were definitely blown. So, okay, I'm going to jump on down to the Curves tab here, and maybe just add a tiny little S curve. I'll drop my black points down a little bit, increase the midpoint there. Yeah, that looks nice. And I'll jump on down to the Lens Correction tab, click those automatic profiles on, and, you know, Lightroom just really nicely takes the curve out of that 50mm lens. Now, I'm going to apply my crop, and this is really where you want to make sure that the image that you selected to do your editing on has a mix of all the important elements in your time-lapse. That way, you're not cropping anything off. But for me, I'm really concerned with having this cutting board dead center. So, I'll select my 16x9 option in this drop-down menu, and I think I'm going to move this overlay up just a tad. There, that's given me this equal space up here and down here between the edges there and on both sides of my cutting board. So, I'll press Return, and now to sync up all of these corrections to every other image in my time-lapse. I'll make sure this image with the corrections is selected first. Then I'm going to scroll all the way back to the very first image, hold Shift, and click on this image. That will select everything there. And now I'll click on the Sync button down here, and this little dialog box will pop up. Now, if you're syncing corrections for a group of images that were all shot with different lenses or different locations, you might want to uncheck some of these items in this dialog box. But for me, everything is the same with this time-lapse. So, I'll just keep all of this stuff checked on here. Now, Lightroom is going to take all of those corrections and apply them to every single one of my images. And then all that's left is to export them as JPEGs or PSDs, and then hop on over to Premiere and take all those hundreds of food styling images and turn them into a single, really cool, amazing food styling time-lapse video clip. All right, so I have my video timeline here. I'm going to press Command-I to import those images. I'll select the folder. And now that I have the folder imported, I can select it again and drag the entire folder over to the timeline. And in just a few more steps, I promise you, we'll be done. Okay, right away, if you look up here at the frame, you'll notice that the image is much larger than the frame size. It's really zoomed in there, but that's not going to be a problem. I can highlight all of these images here on the timeline, left-click and select Scale to Frame Right here, and they'll return back to the proper size. Right now, these images are much larger than the 1920 by 1080 frame that I have here, which is great, actually. It's perfect because I have more space to play with. If I wanted to crop in on my time-lapse for some reason, I have all the pixels to work with. But for this, I'm going to keep it zoomed out at its full width. Now, I want to get all of these single images down here on the timeline into one single clip. So I'm going to left-click on them again, select Nest, give it a name, and click OK. Nesting those frames is going to be really helpful later on. Instead of having 100 different individual clips, I'm going to have one clip to edit with, and that's going to allow me to speed up or slow down the time-lapse or add some really cool transitions. All right, I'm pretty much finished. I'll just give it a play and see what it looks like. All right, that's looking pretty good. It's maybe a little bit fast, so I'll click on the clip, left-click, and then select the speed up here, slow it down to maybe about 50%, and play it again. All right, that's looking good. Now, another thing to note is if I wanted to go in and remove a frame or adjust something when frames and clips are nested like this, I can double-click here, which opens up the clip, and then I can move in frame by frame from there. Now, I could take this time-lapse and I could use it for another project, or I could just export it as is. But like I said before, in my experience, if you're on a shoot and you have some extra time, try creating one of these. They're really fun to make. And hey, your clients, they might love it. They might use it for their own social media account. But either way, I mean, it's something special. It's a freebie. It's extra credit, and you could use it for your own website, your blog, or your Instagram account. All right, before I get out of here, though, I want to announce the winners of the contest I ran on my Facebook group. The challenge was to photograph your best cookie image, and boy, did a lot of people bake up some delicious-looking photos. It was a really tough choice. I mean, so many of you submitted images. If you're not a member of the group yet, go search out WET Food Photographers on Facebook, or We Eat Together Food Photographers, and, you know, join in on the fun. So many cookie images to sort through. Another photographer, Neil Cork, and myself, we made our selections and picked our favorites. We chose two winners, one from my selection and one from Neil. Both winners will get a copy of my Food Photography Masterclass, or if you want to take advantage of the flash sale right now of the bundle, which my course is a part of, you can get my course plus 21 other courses for, like, less than 100 bucks. Either way, you decide, and if you want to get the bundle, I'll give you another course option. All right, well, with so many images to choose from, we only could choose two, and those two winners are Emanuela Sogren and Sonia Noor, with these two delicious images. The first one comes from my pick, Emanuela's. I really love this bowl of macaroons here, and, you know, your environment just works so nicely with these cookies. And from Neil's pick, we have Sonia. I really love this stack of chocolatey goodness. They look really yummy, and your environment is really cool as well. Now we have some lovely runners up here. So we have Giorgio, and that's beautiful. One from Nick. Image from Corey K. One from Bruna. I really love this one. It's probably my second pick. And one from Bozina. An image from Lola. And last but not least, a really beautiful cookie shot from... I can't pronounce your name. I'm really sorry, but you know who you are. All right, well, thank you to everyone for submitting your images, and if you haven't already, join my Facebook group. I'll place a link in the description. Also in the description will be a link to that photography bundle that's on sale right now. That's a huge deal. Don't miss out on that. As well as the contest where you can pick yourself up a copy of this beautiful brew and plate cookbook, which I did the photography for. And you can also win a one-on-one photography coaching session with me. So some big things this week. Check out the links in the description below. Enter the contest. Pick up that bundle, and join the Facebook group. As always, if you like this video, please hit that subscribe button. Turn on notifications. Give it a like. A thumbs up. Drop a comment down below. And I'll see you in the next one. Bye.