Building Lookup Tables

Lesson Info

Building Lookup Tables

One of the things that I wanna show here specifically is what we call a Color Lookup Table. A color lookup table is a very special type of adjustment layer in Photoshop that allows you to access things that have happened through multiple adjustment layers that have been clumped into one adjustment layer. Hard to wrap your head around. You'll see where I'm going with this in a second. I'm gonna go ahead and grab a new adjustment layer down here and right here it's called Color Lookup. You may have clicked on this before but I did nothing; I'm not going anywhere with this. I got nothing. Well, there's color look-up tables that are already preloaded with Photoshop and you can access them through here. If I click on this one right here that says load 3D LUT. If I click on this one it's gonna give me a look and feel to the image and change and alter that look and feel. You look at these 3D LUTs and you're like, man that's cool. Look at how it's altering, you know, the feel of this photograp...

h really quickly with one adjustment layer. What's happening there is a lookup table is a predefined set of actions that happen whether through luminance or contrast, color, blend if. All those things play into a lookup table. It's all these things that would happen in an adjustment layer but you just clump them into one and put them into something called a Color Lookup Table. This can be a really quick and fast way to color grade images. I have three places in my office that I shoot when I shoot my my videos in my office, if you ever see any my sales' videos, as I call them, or my couch videos where I'm sitting on my couch trying to tell you about a new course that I've created. What I do is I record the whole thing with the same camera with all the same settings. I come over to my computer, I have all the same lighting, all the time, it's a very stable light, come over to my computer, plug it in, drag and drop that video into Photoshop, I edit my own videos in Photoshop, and I add a color lookup table that I call "couch videos". That way I know that that's the one that I use to get the look that I have for my videos and it's always gonna be the same across the board. How do you make those though? Well, a Color Lookup Table best practices don't use masks. Don't use any masks. Don't do anything painted with a mask. You see these three files right here, I need to put them into their own group. They're basically a series of adjustment layers that need to go into their own group to be called a Lookup Table. What I'm gonna do for this because it's very difficult to do it on a video, I'm gonna show you how to do this by going on to just a regular photograph. So let's just pull in. We're gonna use this photo anyway. Let's pull this photo in. I'll go back over to here. I'm gonna take these three layers, I'm gonna press and hold Shift on these layers. Grab all of them, and when I grab all of them, I'm gonna press and hold Shift and move them over to this stagnant image. It's not a video, it's a stagnant image. That essentially is gonna be the color lookup table that we build for this video from the adjustment layers that we used. If I press Command + Control + G to put them into a group, that's gonna make sure that this becomes the color lookup table that I want and then I'll go up to File, I'll go to Export and right at the bottom of the Export you're gonna see right here, Color Lookup Tables, just go ahead and click on that. It's gonna ask you a series of questions, what do you want to call this? Let's just call it Test Lookup. Make sure you highlight all of that, just press Control + A, highlight all of that and press Control + C to copy it, this will come into play in a second here. If I wanted to copyright this I could put my name on it and copyright it to Blake Rudis. The quality is based on the grid points and basically how high of a quality you want this color lookup table to be. I usually just set it to high quality. You don't necessarily have to have all four of these checked. You can just make it just an ICC profile if you'd like, and press OK. It's gonna ask me, where do I want to save this to. Well, I'm gonna save it right here into the folder that I already have where all of this video information is. If I go ahead and just press Control + V, right there, I'm gonna call that Test Lookup because I'm not quite sure which one it is but one of these actually dictates what its gonna be called in Photoshop, and I'm not sure if it's what we called it or what we title it. So, I just make sure whatever I title it and whatever I put as .LUT and whatever I put as my description, they're both the same thing, OK. Press save. It's gonna do this weird thing where you don't see exactly what's happening. If I go ahead and delete this and go down here to color lookup and go to load from device link, if I click on this, it's gonna ask me where do I want to load this from. I'm gonna go over into our folder that contains our videos and we'll see inside the layered video this test lookup table? after I found it, I can double click it and now I've got that lookup table loaded. So, you might be wondering why you're gonna have to find it every single time. Not necessarily, you don't have to find it every single time. There is a place on your computer that's different whether you're using a Mac or Windows PC that is going to house all of your color lookup tables. These color lookup tables are not just things that get used in Photoshop, these get used all over your computer actually. So, what I do to find that, is I go to whatever my master area is on my PC, so that'd be the C Drive and I just do a search for something that I see inside here. I know for a fact that nothing else on my computer is gonna be titled, 2Strip.look. All we're gonna search for 2Strip.look, 'cause it's pulling this from somewhere right, and that's where I'll put those lookup tables. It ends up being like windows32/color/profiles/spool/ who knows if you can even find this place/ glad you made it here/ put this thing here. It's really, you know you just gotta kinda find these things but if you do a search for it whether you're on a Mac or a PC search for something that's a color lookup table somewhere else in here and then when you drag and drop that new color lookup table that you made it will show up under device link after you reload Photoshop. So right now you see it loaded right here under device link that's because I found it. If I were to turn this color lookup table off, it's not all three layers it's all the information that happened within those three layers. Can you use color lookup tables on other things, other than other than video? Absolutely, you can use color lookup tables on a regular still photograph. I do it all the time. I tend to use them a lot in my video process that's why I'm showing them you here in this portion of boot camp.

Class Description

Lessons

1. Bootcamp Introduction
2. The Bridge Interface
3. Setting up Bridge
4. Overview of Bridge
5. Practical Application of Bridge
6. Introduction to Raw Editing
7. Setting up ACR Preferences & Interface
8. Global Tools Part 1
9. Global Tools Part 2
10. Local Tools
11. Introduction to the Photoshop Interface
12. Toolbars, Menus and Windows
13. Setup and Interface
14. Adobe Libraries
15. Saving Files
16. Introduction to Cropping
17. Cropping for Composition in ACR
18. Cropping for Composition in Photoshop
19. Cropping for the Subject in Post
20. Cropping for Print
21. Perspective Cropping in Photoshop
22. Introduction to Layers
23. Vector & Raster Layers Basics
24. Adjustment Layers in Photoshop
25. Organizing and Managing Layers
26. Introduction to Layer Tools and Blend Modes
27. Screen and Multiply and Overlay
28. Soft Light Blend Mode
29. Color and Luminosity Blend Modes
30. Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes
31. Introduction to Layer Styles
32. Practical Application: Layer Tools
33. Introduction to Masks and Brushes
34. Brush Basics
35. Custom Brushes
36. Brush Mask: Vignettes
37. Brush Mask: Curves Dodge & Burn
38. Brush Mask: Hue & Saturation
39. Mask Groups
40. Clipping Masks
41. Masking in Adobe Camera Raw
42. Practical Applications: Masks
43. Introduction to Selections
44. Basic Selection Tools
45. The Pen Tool
46. Masks from Selections
47. Selecting Subjects and Masking
48. Color Range Mask
49. Luminosity Masks Basics
50. Introduction to Cleanup Tools
51. Adobe Camera Raw
52. Healing and Spot Healing Brush
53. The Clone Stamp Tool
54. The Patch Tool
55. Content Aware Move Tool
56. Content Aware Fill
57. Custom Cleanup Selections
58. Introduction to Shapes and Text
59. Text Basics
60. Shape Basics
61. Adding Text to Pictures
62. Custom Water Marks
63. Introduction to Smart Objects
64. Smart Object Basics
65. Smart Objects and Filters
66. Smart Objects and Image Transformation
67. Smart Objects and Album Layouts
68. Smart Objects and Composites
69. Introduction to Image Transforming
70. ACR and Lens Correction
71. Photoshop and Lens Correction
72. The Warp Tool
73. Perspective Transformations
74. Introduction to Actions in Photoshop
75. Introduction to the Actions Panel Interface
76. Making Your First Action
77. Modifying Actions After You Record Them
78. Adding Stops to Actions
79. Conditional Actions
80. Actions that Communicate
81. Introduction to Filters
82. ACR as a Filter
83. Helpful Artistic Filters
84. Helpful Practical Filters
85. Sharpening with Filters
86. Rendering Trees
87. The Oil Paint and Add Noise Filters
88. Introduction to Editing Video
89. Timeline for Video
90. Cropping Video
91. Adjustment Layers and Video
92. Building Lookup Tables
93. Layers, Masking Video & Working with Type
94. ACR to Edit Video
95. Animated Gifs
96. Introduction to Creative Effects
97. Black, White, and Monochrome
98. Matte and Cinematic Effects
99. Gradient Maps and Solid Color Grades
100. Gradients
101. Glow and Haze
102. Introduction to Natural Retouching
103. Brightening Teeth
104. Clean Up with the Clone Stamp Tool
105. Cleaning and Brightening Eyes
106. Advanced Clean Up Techniques
107. Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization
108. ACR for Portraits Pre-Edits
109. Portrait Workflow Techniques
110. Introduction to Landscape Workflow & Bridge Organization
111. Landscape Workflow Techniques
112. Introduction to Compositing & Bridge
113. Composite Workflow Techniques
114. Landscape Composite Projects
115. Bonus: Rothko and Workspace
116. Bonus: Adding Textures to Photos
117. Bonus: The Mask (Extras)
118. Bonus: The Color Range Mask in ACR