From the course: Creating Presets, LUTs, and Profiles for Photography

What is a LUT?

From the course: Creating Presets, LUTs, and Profiles for Photography

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What is a LUT?

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- A LUT, or a look up table, is a very useful piece of technology. It's essentially a shared language that can be spoken between many different computer applications. Now, you might think of a LUT as a profile, or a description of how to handle color. These come in a handful of file formats, but the cube file format is by far the most common. When you apply a LUT, the colors and tone of your image are manipulated. They can be shifted for hue. Contrast can be changed. Exposure can be changed. The LUT describes the information. Usually, we're going to work with 3D LUTs. This means that it's cube shaped, and it describes the components of color: the red, green, and blue. Now, LUT files are designed to work on RGB images. But it is possible to use a 1D LUT that just describes contrast information, which can be useful when making a pure black and white image, or just to adjust exposure and tone. LUT files are very common and are widely used in the film and video industry, but the photography industry has been catching on because a lot of creative folks use these to easily exchange information. One of the key benefits of LUTs is that you can apply the same recipe to the video project that you are working on, as well as the photography project. And LUTs can even be adapted to be used on output displays. LUTS are used in the field when capturing to simulate what footage might look like. So, people can apply a look up table to their view finder or monitor when capturing video, in particular, but even photography! What this really allows for is more creative options. The look up table contains the recipe for color and tone, which are the key to really any look or style that you're going to generate. Sure, you might have other filters or parts to a recipe to get the final look, but this is the foundation. And by saving LUTs, you can build up a huge library that you can quickly access the next time you want to experiment or try something new out.

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