Lessons

Lesson Info

Color LUT

one of things that came out in aa photoshopped six I believe it wass was an interesting option a new type of adjustment layer most adjustment layers have presense so if I wanted to do some color toning or color grading to this image I could use some of these adjustment layers like for example photo filter and this is tried to emulate when you take a photograph and put a filter on the end of your camera for different purposes but this is like after the fact so you can see there's a whole long list of warming filter and cooling filter on each one that I do you see it's having an effect on the image so I can go through and either pick some color that I think it's gonna look good or just choose my own say what happens if I pick this one you'll see that the lighter colors tend to do more than the darker colors and like any adjustment layer it typically has setting so you can see I want to go really obvious or not so much it has a mask of course of either paint on the mask or don't forget th...

ere's always that blend if slider option if you want to see what happens if I only make the highlight parts of this so I can start to pull some of this away by using the blend of sliders to apply the way that the adjustment layer is being added so that's always been an option c six added a new kind of adjustment layer which was kind of interesting called color look up and these are based on technology called color lookup tables and in the first version all it really was was the option of picking ones that were provided for you with interesting names like back black light poster so you choose it you go okay does kind of look like a poster I had in my bedroom on black velvet many years ago I never had those but all of these are just built in ones and just look at them and basically say do I like them or not that's kind of interesting so you look through and there's various options see pia taken other ones are a little bit more unusual but the ultimately you look at something neither you like the ones that were there can see there's a lot of them or I should say and or we still have the same possibility lower the opacity of this adjustment change the blend mode of that adjustment to say only wanted dark in certain areas or student overlay so all of these are going to impact the way it works and we can drive those blended slider so that's the way color lookup tables worked up until recently is just it was a matter of you pick one and they were existing and the first question that many of us had was where did these come from and how do I make my own and the answer used to be when you go into this other adobe software that was made for film people which is the most complicated thing you've ever seen and I tried it ten times and it never worked so I kind of went well I guess I'll just live with the fact that these are the ones who are available in photoshopped cc twenty fourteen they added the ability now where you can finally and very nicely create your own color lookup tables or loots as they like to call them for look up tables so you can create some look that you like in photo shop and then exported as a color lookup table to add to other photographs now at first glance people might say well why wouldn't you just take the same adjustment layer and move it on to a different image and that's completely true if it was only one adjustment layer but part of the idea of this creating your own color lookup table is you can add multiple adjustment layers and play with opacity and blend of sliders and all those kind of things you can really create a look you want that includes anything except masking so if you mask anything that won't have any impact on the final result but for example here I'll start with this one and then let's add a black and white adjustment and I can tell you right now I have absolutely no plan here I'm just playing and trying something to see what I get so I really don't know exactly going to happen here but let's just try this and then lower the opacity and maybe try soft light now I don't like that about multiply at a lower opacity and let's add one mohr eh photo filter but let's dio a cooling filter okay so I'm going to say for the sake of argument that that is a look that I have created that I want to use on multiple images well instead of trying to remember all of these adjustment layers or somehow copy them in bulk and remember this one was darkened at this percentage opacity and so on you get it looking the way you want and the on ly other trick to this I discovered the first time I tried this is I had opened a smart object camera smart logic and started adding adjustment airs and I went to try and export the color lookup table it said you do not have the background layer so this will not work so you have to have a layer called background for this function toe work so that was one thing I just have to realize for future reference so I choose export color lookup tables and then it gives you a description if you were going to share with other people I suppose you could copyright to say this is mine I don't know I haven't bothered doing that and then we just put it here on her desktop call it today's we knows the one I just made now if I were to open a different photo from the same photo shoot that I wanted to have that same kind of look now I could go to my adjustment layers to color look up and not the top it says load I can go unload and find the one I just made and now that photo has the same look he loves to say that I don't have all of the elements to be able to edit each one but this is assuming you've already defined a look that you like and if anything you might do global adjustments like lower the opacity or change the blend mode or paint on the mask so this is a function that's available to the photo shop si si twenty fourteen is this new ability to export your own lookup tables even if you cannot do that if you don't have that version don't overlook the existing color lookup tables because there's a lot of them some of them do a very good job of emulating film looks others are ones where someone else just went through decided I'm going to make this look that has this particular look on one things that I always say about any pre sets that were built in the photo shop I often joke about some of the presets the dope provide saying they're not terribly useful in a practical world but what they all are all useful for is being able to deconstruct say how did they do that so with the exception of these ones because you can't look inside how they did the color lookup table but every other kind of pre set if it's layer styles or something else you'll apply babel look out and go oh they did this this and this then you can still go back and tweak that with these color lookup tables the only downside is you can't look inside of them but it's a very nice way to be able to apply to a series of image associate another kind of precept that we have available to us okay so let's go here so when we start to look through our adjustment layers a lot of them have the same process we're talking about so let's go to just use black and white for example first of all so in here you can see these are the pre sets that have been provided for us so anything we want to do if we want to see what happens if we change it to this setting the preset says this is what it looks like but then we can still tweet the results in any way we want and then maybe you really like that version better than the one that says here so we could go back to this pop up menu and shoes save a black and white preset so then I can call it whatever I want you can see here in this folder I already have created some so these pop up in this list so if you have projects whatever it is whether you're converting color or black and white are doing color adjustments or any kind of function like that there's tends to be some repetition that I really like this look I'm sure many people have seen there are lots of action's out there that say if you play this action you will apply the instagram look or whatever it might be we can achieve similar things very often by creating presense by playing around with different combinations going that's a look that I like I'm going to save that as a present for two reasons eh it's quicker and be it saves solves a problem me going back later and trying remember how did I do that because one of things that I found all the time what happen to me as I play around with some settings well that's really cool and then later on I go I really don't remember how I did that so I prefer not to do that so saving a precept means the next time you're working here you have you will see here's mine that I've done previously so here's all these options now clearly some of these air just once that I was doing for demonstration is having a preset called dave's I would say it's not terribly useful to know that because you know what does that exactly mean I don't know if I have to look at and go oh ok so oh as you're looking through these adjustment layers be aware that many of them have presets but some don't for example vibrant saturation there's no preset options just you move a slider so if you ever go doing adjustment layer and don't see an option that simply means those air one of a handful where you can't save any kind of recent now if you have this latest version I suppose in theory you could do hugh saturation and then do one of those color lookup tables is just just simply for saturation that would be a possibility as well okay all right so let's go this one here now earlier in one of the other sessions we talked about those introduce the topic of using the luminosity masks as a way of making adjustments here's an example of the type of image where I might I tried to work with that because when I look at it I've got some fairly dark shadow areas I also have some pretty bright highlight areas I want want to adjust them separately so hopefully I still kept that action and here I think I did it iss if I play that action that's one of the benefits of actions now just like that I have those luminosity mass already in my channels panel now if I had a larger monitor here a bigger work area I would tend to separate out layers and channels so I can see both of them because what I want to do is command or control click on the appropriate channel toe load that selection and then add an adjustment layer and adjusted today I'm gonna have to sort of flip back and forth but when you have more real estate that just makes it easier to see all of those channels available and you're just looking on the one you want to get to that next step so for example down here in this area it feels to me like there's that shadow is a little on the dark side so if I command control click on this darkest one you'll see it's select all the showers but typically you're going to see mostly the darkest ones and just again to clarify what's happening here if I were to duplicate that you would see this is what it's selected so part of the reason this is a nice method of working I want to worry about seeing really harsh edges where if we just took a selection tool and said select that area would tend to be very specific here is doing it based on the existing shades so let's go back and do that again so we can actually unjust it this time so go to something like curves and all I want to do is try to lighten up those dark areas now one things that happens automatically and it's very good for our purposes whenever you have a selection and you admit justin layers we've said it creates a mask that means those areas the on ly parts I'm working on or what moment ago were selected right now it's this mask so the white ist parts of this image are what's being selected I could and I will in a second decide to change that little bit so this was based on the luminosity mass that was already there but let's do a quick adjustment to say let's just brighten up those shadow air is a little bit having effect I'm looking down here in this part where the darkest shadows are and you can see there is a bit of a change of getting a bit more detail if I decided this point when especially when I look at the layer mask it looks to me like it's obviously got all of these shadows and hear a little bit and maybe a bit in this area here I could choose two in the context of the photograph take my paintbrush with a pretty low opacity and I've got the foreman cultural said it to black and say I want to really make sure that you're not affecting this area here or over here so I'm still starting off with the adjustment layer I should say that the mask based on that luminosity mass but I don't have to stick with it and go oh well generally because of the way luminosity mass work that adjustment we're making is pretty subtle so let's go back now channels and get he's sort of mid bright areas those selection and in this case I think I actually want to come down a bit because they're almost a bit too bright when I do that again I'm looking at a lot of the sky type areas and the highlights and the water then that's gonna allow me to just pull those down look at the the building in the back I should look back here he looks kind of very pale but now when I turned that on there's a bit more color coming into it because I'm darkening that area a little bit and aiken play with this as much as I want many case that this is how if you have should probably take a deep cleansing breath and say I don't do those on every one of my photographs because it could take a while but if you have a photograph that you love that you're like but gosh I wish I could dig into a little further and really tweak it a bit that's where this technique comes in because otherwise you'd be spending half your life painting on the mask here but now I'm just taking advantage of these luminosity mass to say select this range of highlights or shadows and adjust just that so I've had a case is not a lot but once where I was like preparing an image to print and hang on my wall where they were probably eight adjustment layers thomas finished but each adjustment layer had a luminosity mask attached to it so is being have had a very specific task and don't forget we look at this this is our mask for this one let's look at the properties panel for a second if I looked at that and said it's still a little too much I could if I wanted intensified even more and more goes toe white is goingto have maurin effect I can't make it darker however this way so if I want to make sure that certain areas aren't having as much of an effect then I could use is one of the rare case where I used levels by itself I'm applying levels to this mask doesn't really want to darken that upsets not having as much of an effect is the same kind of theory as using the mask and then painting on it to say not those areas this is saying overall I want to go a little less intense in these areas now let's do one other one I want to take the uh brightest area and do one last one kind of the same idea but we're going to go you saturation trying can't saturate the colors and dark and just a hair so there's just a bit more bit of blue in there to be honest there's some people like me I have absolutely no qualms at all about taking another sky and pacing it right in there some people are like purists and say hey that wasn't the way that day was I'm going to pull out whatever detail was there yeah I was there and I know that this guy this day was like there was a was great there was nothing there so I wouldn't put a vibrant blue sky in it but I wouldn't be hesitant to say let me see what it looks like with some other colors guy in there I'm gonna do that will quickly seek and see an example of how I might do that I'm still going to eventually turn those back on again but I just want to see what it looks like here one of the challenges we face is they can see in the selection there a little tiny tv antennas or something up in the sky and if I pace in the sky and right now is going to replace those completely so let's just do a quick little revisit of our masking techniques to say I want to make sure I leased take these out of the selection I'm not worried about those little and tv antennas because we'll fix those in a second or they will be fixed okay so now school back where we remember which folder that was that would have been here now let's see this one okay so right now this guy is looking pretty vibrant which for our purposes probably a bit too much so let's pull it back a little bit to begin with I'm just trying to add some interest I'm not going to try to fake it and put like a vibrant blue sky when there wasn't one so select all copy come back to this one I already have my existing selection of the sky so as we saw earlier I'm going to choose this spate paste special and paste into when I do that it automatically puts a new layer with the mask and again the mask is unlinked what that allows me to do is now I can move this around and try and find a spot that looks a little more like I want and if we zoom in see the problem is it's still kind of covered up those antenna well the solution is very simple just lower the opacity back just enough by the way that also can help the wonderful things where you're if you have an edge it doesn't look very good this will just sell that believability and that if we turn these other one's back on again now I'm doing it in context so I would now lower they'll pass even mohr move it around where I want end I always like to have whenever I paced in the sky I always like to have a sky that's much bigger than I need to give myself more room to move and especially if I have a whole folder full of cloudy skies because sometimes when you're trying to make masks election ej you see little bits of white if you just move your new sky so there's white clouds behind it obviously doesn't look has obvious so let's just see the difference here this was our original photo looks kind of it's okay but it's kind of a little on the pale under sing side but as I add all these other elements back in now I'm being able to pull out more detail it should not surprise you it all by now hopefully that at this point I would do two things first of all I would save it as a psd file to make sure I have this master copy but if I was prepared to move on and do more things I would probably take all of these layers and convert them to a smart object so that way I can do things like sharpening and do whatever I want but still have access to everything so this is me sound like a broken record at this point but that's I think that's really important because that's the way we're going to know how do we give ourselves the most options when we're working now this particular example I just had it open originally as a background layer now that I look at it even though I've done all these adjustments I'm thinking that I wish I could give it a bit of that camera raw editing ability so this is again that the fact that we now have this option if I make this smart I can go to the filter menu and toothy camera filter and still make a few little tweaks here with things like especially that good old clarity slider that I couldn't otherwise get before and once I do that I may need to pull back some of these other ones because now it looks a little bit overdone in some other areas like this one maybe needs to be pulled back just a little bit and not the the balancing act we have to work with at this point is how can we create an image that we like without spending too much time on it if I was a wedding photographer on these were wedding photos I wouldn't be spending this much time doing this high level of editing unless these were the handful that I knew were going to need to be printed large or put in a a photo book of some kind if it's part of a process than we want to streamline this as much as possible the good news is by having that action that does thie luminosity mask gets them in there right away I could at least know they're there if I need them to do quicker ending from that standpoint but this is where the advantage of presets and potentially having actions that do things and even things like we saw earlier using that method of using color samples to measure areas techniques like that take a bit of time the first couple of times you do it but then eventually it I'm not working at any pace that's that much different than normally do be except that I'm stopping to explain things but normally you can go through it fairly quickly once you get used to them and we'll see more than that when we do the little project towards the end as to how we can start to build those kind of things in now the other thing I want to show you and we'll look at some other examples before I actually progress jim do we have any questions on the things with you talking about to have a couple of questions karen would just like a reiteration if you didn't mention it how can you save the color look up that you have selected okay um this is again this is a version specific thing this is photoshopped cc twenty fourteen so if you have an earlier version that that option wasn't available but what it does it says takes whatever where do I have one that I was working on this no this one here we go so you have all your various adjustment layers and you have to have a background there then you go to file export color lookup table so if you go to file export and you don't see it that means you don't have the version which has this update in it it's a fairly recent addition I want to say it was the first twenty fourteen but at this point that's part of the challenge is remembering at what point it came in so if the bottom line is if you do a series of just myers and you go to file export you don't see it there then you don't have that ability I'm sorry but if you do it's pretty cool