Creating a Custom LUT
Lesson 3 from: Transforming Day Into Night in PhotoshopBen Willmore
Creating a Custom LUT
Lesson 3 from: Transforming Day Into Night in PhotoshopBen Willmore
Lesson Info
3. Creating a Custom LUT
Lessons
Lesson Info
Creating a Custom LUT
All these things are is they're not special at all. The only thing that's special about these is that they could be applied at 30 frames per second on a video device. These are all made using normal adjustment layers in Photoshop and then you can save them out as these. In fact, look, I have a couple of them right here. Uh And look how do I save my own here? Hmm I wonder how we could make our own. Let's find out. Well, we could make up a certain look in here using any kind of adjustment layer you want. You just can't use any masks. So let's actually start with one of those color, look up ones and see if we can improve on it. I'm gonna come in here and choose maybe either now right from day or maybe moonlight. One of those two, let's say moonlight. What I don't like about this is how colorful things are afterwards. My eye is really drawn to this yellow car and the red that's here. And to me that makes it not feel like nighttime. So I'm gonna reduce the saturation and the image. So I'm g...
onna do a human saturation adjustment layer, but I'm not gonna put it on top of the stack because if I reduce the saturation, it's also going to reduce this bluish purple color that it's added to the image. So instead I'm gonna drag this newly created adjustment layer below the color look up because anything that's at the bottom is considered to be applied first and then whatever is above it is applied after. So if this layer is adding the bluish purple and it's on top, it should be done after we adjust the saturation with this one that's below. All I'm gonna do is go over here and adjust my saturation. And I'm gonna bring it down as I look at that yellow car in the reddish one and I'm gonna bring it down until it feels like nighttime where it's not easy to see exactly what color things are. You just get a hint of it. But at this point, I wish I could see a little bit more shadow detail. So I'm gonna then do another adjustment layer. I'm gonna come down here and this time I'm gonna use curves, but it could be anything that could add contrast to the image. And I'm gonna see if I can pull out a little bit of detail in this image. Uh If I want to shatter detail, then it would be in this section. If I wanted more highlight brightness would be over here. So I'm just gonna go over here and say, let's add a dot Down here to keep really dark stuff from changing. I'm not gonna move that dot At all and therefore I'm just locking in the brightness of things that are this bright. Do you see the shade that's directly underneath that dot But then it's stuff about this bright that I want to be brighter. So I'm gonna click right here and drag up slightly to get that a little bit brighter. But any time you drag up like that, the rest of the curve up here also goes higher and it sometimes is more dramatic. Look at how far away this dot is from the original diagonal line. It's just a little bit but look at how far it's been moved up here a lot further. So I might just add another dot And pull that rest back down. It's really up to you as far as what kind of change you'd like to make to the image. But I'm gonna turn off this eyeball to show you before and after it's just slightly brighter. In fact, I'm probably gonna make it more obvious by grabbing both of these dots and just moving them up a bit. Let's say that's what I wanted. So all we needed to do is somehow build a look using adjustment layers. I can't use any masks though I can though, use other features I can go in and do things like use a capacity I can use a blending mode. I could come down here to the letters FX and go all the way up here because maybe that human Sam oration, maybe what I'd like to do is make it to the underlying image that's there. So the colors come through in the bright areas but not the dark or the other way around. Whatever it is, you could play with these to do that and this technique would still work. So now let's see how we can create one of those Lutz a color look up table so that we could apply it the same way I did before where it's a single adjustment layer and it gives me this end result. Well, all I need to do is make sure that my original image is on a layer that's called background. I mean a real background layer where it's got to lock to the ride and so on. If yours wasn't already, you go up to the layer menu, you can choose new and there'd be a choice in here background from layer and it doesn't show up right now because we already have one. Then above that, you want to have just adjustment layers with empty masks, then you can do this. If you go to the file menu, there's a choice called export and I can go in here and say color look up tables. And I'm gonna just come in here and choose three D L and you could use cube and some of these others, but the top is a three D look up table. Uh And that's the menu we were choosing from earlier. Uh This choice of 32 the default is usually fine and it doesn't matter what this description is set to or your copyright, you're not gonna see it anywhere. I'm just gonna click. OK? And then it's gonna ask me if I'd like to save this and I'm just gonna call this Ben's Night look and I'll save it now. We can apply that to any image if I were to take these layers and turn them off. And I would add a brand new color look up. Then in this little menu at the top where it says 3D Lut file, I would not find my uh choice in here. But do you notice there are a few that I've made? Well, if you choose the top most option, it's gonna ask you for a file and I saved mine on my desktop. It's right here. I could choose open and now I have it. It's a single layer instead of being made out of three. And this could be applied to live video in a video display monitor or other video device. But how can I get it to actually appear in this menu? Well, there's just a special place we gotta move it to if I go to my operating system and I find where my Photoshop application is stored on my computer on a Mac. It's under applications and then Photoshop and then here's where we wanna go presets inside the presets folder. You're gonna find this 13 D Lutz, whatever you put inside that folder shows up in that menu. When you make a color, look up adjustment. And that's just where I put my two. Now, I can just go to my desktop and grab that file. I just made and drag it to here. Now on mine, my operating system asked for permission and I'll give it permission there. I just used my fingerprint identification on my keyboard in order to put it in there. And so this is not gonna show up right now when I use Photoshop because it only looks, looks at this folder at the time you launch Photoshop. So I'd have to quit Photoshop started back up again. But I had these two in here before I launched Photoshop. And therefore when I come up here to my menu, you see that they show up, but I'll get an extra one in here if I ever quit Photoshop and relaunch it. So doing it through a lot is convenient because you don't have to remember what combination of adjustments you originally created things from. And you can just apply it as a single adjustment layer which can be nice.