Adobe® Photoshop® CC® Bootcamp

Lesson 92 of 118

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

Adobe® Photoshop® CC® is a valuable tool for photographers, but it can also be intimidating. In this all-inclusive 20 lesson course, you’ll go from opening the program for the first time to creating images that really stand out. Join Blake Rudis, Photoshop® expert and founder of f64 Academy, as he shows you how to maximize your use of Photoshop®. Topics covered will include:

Week 1
• Class Introduction & Bridge, Adobe Camera Raw, Setup Interface, Cropping and Layers
Week 2
• Layer Tools, Masks, Selections, Clean-Up Tools and Shapes & Text
Week 3
• Smart Objects , Transforming, Actions, Filters and Editing Video
Week 4
• Custom Creative Effects, Natural Retouching, Portrait Workflow, Landscape Workflow, and Composite Workflow

Don’t let the many aspects of Photoshop® prevent you from maximizing your use of this amazing app. Blake will help you develop the confidence to use your imagination and create the images that you will be proud to share with your clients.

Software Used: Adobe® Photoshop® CC® 2018

Lessons

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Reviews

a Creativelive Student

Amazing course, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a beginner's course for photographers. The problem isn't Blake's explanations; they're top. The problem is the vast scope of this course and the order in which the topics are presented. Take layers for example. When I was first learning Photoshop (back when we learned from books), I found I learned little or nothing from, for example, books that covered layers before they covered how to improve/process photographs. These books taught me how to organize, move, and link layers before they showed me what a layer was actually for. Those books tended to teach me everything there is to know about layers (types of layers, how to organize them, how to move them, how to move them two at a time, how to move them two at a time even if there are other layers between the two you're interested in, useful troubleshooting tips, etc. ) all before I even know (from a photographer's point of view) what it is the things actually do. The examples of organizing, linking, and moving mean everything for graphic designers from Day One, but for photographers not so much. Blake does the same thing as those books. Topics he covers extremely early demand a lot of theoretical imagination for a photographer who doesn't already know quite a bit about what he is talking about. Learning about abstract things first and concrete things later only makes PS that much harder to understand. If you AREN'T a beginner, however, this course is amazing. I thought it would be like an Army Bootcamp, taking you from zero and building you into a fit, competent Photoshop grunt. Now I think it's more like Army Bootcamp for high school varsity jocks. It isn't going to take you from the beginning, but the amount you'll get out of it is nonetheless more than your brain can imagine. I've been using PS for years to improve my photographs, and even to create the odd artistic composite or two. The amount I've learned in the first week is amazing, and every day I learn something -- more like many things -- which I immediately implement to improve my productivity and/or widen the horizons of what I can achieve. If you ARE a photographer who's a Photoshop beginner, I'd take very seriously the advice Blake gives in the introduction: Watch one lesson, and practice the skills and principles you learn in that one lesson for two weeks. THEN watch the next lesson. You can't do that of course without buying the course, so it's up to you to decide whether you'd like to learn Photoshop and master Photoshop all from the same course. Learning it first and mastering it later will cost more money, but I think you'll understand everything better and have a much more enjoyable ride in the process. As for me? I'm going to have to find the money to buy this course. There is simply way too much content in each lesson for me to try to take on all at once, but on the other hand I don't want to miss anything at all that he has to share.

Esther Gambrell

WOW!!! I've been purchasing CL classes for several years now and have watched HOURS of "How-To Photoshop" classes, but this is the first one I've actually purchased because of the AWESOME BONUS content!!! SERIOUSLY??!!?!? A PLUG-IN??? But not only that, Blake is SO easy to understand, and he breaks down concepts in different ways to connect with different people's learning styles. I REALLY appreciated this approach because I am a LEFT-BRAINED creative that has an engineering background, so I really connected to what Blake was saying. THANK YOU FOR THAT! There are TONS of Photoshop courses out there, but I found this one to be the most helpful in they way Blake teaches concepts so that you know WHY you're doing what your doing. I feel like he taught me how to fish with Photoshop to feed me for a lifetime instead of just giving me a fish to feed me for one day. This is the BEST overall PS course out there!!! Thank you!!!!

Sonya Messier

I'm been using Bridge, Adobe Raw and Photoshop for 12 years. I thought I knew those programs until I started to follow Blake and do this Photoshop CC Bootcamp. This course is AMAZING. I love the way Blake teach, brakes down concepts and tools... excellent teaching qualities! I'm half way in this course and I change all my workflow already. Much better results and better use of what Adobe offer me. This course is an investment! When I will be done, I will listen it again. Great job and congratulations on your success Blake!

1,500+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

Adobe® Photoshop® CC® Bootcamp

Building Lookup Tables

Class Description

Lessons

a Creativelive Student

Esther Gambrell

Sonya Messier