From the course: Video Gear

Applying or modifying a LUT

From the course: Video Gear

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Applying or modifying a LUT

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- Historically, tools like After Effects and video editing tools have had very different user interfaces when it came to color. And now Adobe is supporting lookup tables in both Premiere Pro and After Effects, and there are third-party solutions for things like Final Cut Pro 10 and Avid as well. - Sure, and Adobe has been doing this for a long time now with the .look format, which is actually just a proprietary LUT format, but both Premiere Pro, After Effects, Media Encoder, even Photoshop, can support lookup tables in a wide variety of formats, .cubes for example. And just a moment ago, Rich, we used Adobe Hue to model some tonality from the real world, and when we save that and sync it with our Creative Cloud account, what it's really doing is saving a high-precision LUT. - And this LUT can be used by you, can be shared with other people on your team, so if you're collaborating on a project you can make a set and organize it and then share that with other people on your team and they can add to it or use them as well. - Right, so here we are in After Effects and I have some LUTs over here in my libraries folder, and if you watched the previous movie you would have seen these LUTs on my phone. And so, for example, I saved a look called "Warm Dubai" and I actually have this shot, it's kind of similar, it's this nice, warm shot of Nationals Baseball Stadium here in Washington, D.C. and all I want to do to apply this shot, I'll simply drag the saved look onto the shot, and there you go, Rich, you can see that we now have that kind of warm, sunshine shot that I had from that picture of Dubai. And if I open up my effects here, you'll just see that it's "Apply Color LUT," and I can do a couple of things, I can toggle this on and off, but here inside of After Effects, I can also come into my compositing options and you can see it's just this .cute file that's the LUT itself. And if I wanted to composite this, maybe I want to kind of bring it back just a little bit, something like 74% or so, I can do that easily. Now, maybe take a shot like this, I kind of like her glasses and the bandana she has on, but maybe it's just a little too vibrant, maybe I want to tone that back, well, I have another previously saved look that I want to apply, this is kind of a desaturated look, so I'll take that, drag it onto her right there. - [Rich] Yeah. - [Rob] Now you can see it's really desaturated, much more muted. Now here's the thing Rich: I don't want anybody to think that this is just one-button color-correction, now, for these particular shots, it worked out pretty nice, but that's what happens when you demo things. In the real world, the way that I'm using these LUTs is as a starting point, I'm out there in the real world capturing things that I like the color and contrasts of, syncing it to Creative Cloud and then applying it to, say, here in After Effects, to kind of be the basis of my color correction. - Now, over in Premiere Pro, what's kind of nice is there's a few more controls when it comes to lookup tables. You can modify them a bit to boost or fade them and that works out pretty well, but Rob brings up a good point: if you apply a lookup table to a shot that needs color correction, it's just going to look like an effected shot that looks bad, and not every LUT is going to be a one-click fix. A lot of times it's just a jumpstart, but you still have to refine it with other tools. But as a way of saving time or as a way of collaborating with others to give them a starting point, this is pretty cool. - Now, Rich, I want to show you one more thing because you mentioned Premiere Pro, and in Premiere Pro there's actually a couple of different ways of working. First, if I come into my "Effects" tab, you'll notice that I have this photo called "Lumetry Presets." - [Rich] Yeah. - [Rob] Lumetry comes from the speed grade side of things and these are just presets looks, or LUTs, that Adobe has created. So you can take any one of these LUTs, or these presets, and drag it over to a clip. So, Rich, besides the lumetry presets and the dedicated lumetry effect, over here on the lumetry color panel, which is new is CC 2015, I have a couple of different places that I can work with LUTs. First, in my input LUT, I can choose from a number of presets that Adobe has provided to me, and these would be used for things like converting LOG footage to Rec. 709 and things of that nature. - [Rich] Yes, and there's some great things in here for things like GoPro to deal with the flat profile and put a little life in or really a lot of other cameras that are pretty typical, and you can also get these from manufacturers or work with somebody to create it. But this is going to correct sort of the camera initially, and it serves as a way of boosting some of the stuff that might have been lost with a RAW format or a LOG format. - [Rob] Right, and the way that LUTs function is, multiple ways, actually, you can imply it as an input LUT so it's kind of a de facto conversion, but you'll see here in the creative section I also have a "Look" pulldown. Now, it's not called "Input LUT," it's called "Look," but the idea is the same. This allows me to apply a lookup table and I have some presets here, but I can always just come in and click "Browse," and I'm actually going to come in to, I have a folder right here, and I'm going to come in and open up a preset that I have saved. This is a C300 shot and I actually just created a LUT, which we'll show you how to do in a later movie with an application called Lattice that's just going to boost the saturation of the shot and kind of create a more stylized look. So I'll click "Open" and just like that you can see that I now have that boosted, and with the adjustment section here, Rich, this is really cool. I can do things like adjust the intensity of that applied look, so if I think, "Hey, that saturation was a little much," I can kind of split the difference and dial it in as I see fit. - [Rich] And that's working well as that starting point. You still need to go in and tweak each one a little bit. - Sure. - But with the ability to boost or tweak it up or down just slightly, this really is a jumpstart. And earlier in After Effects you saw how there was that panel that collected them, well, you've got that same type of panel in Premiere Pro. Now, you can find out more about this workflow, just check out the Premiere Pro or After Effects new features title here on Lynda.com or the essentials training title on "Go Deeper," but we want to take a look at another application that Robbie mentioned, and that is Lattice, which is going to allow us more control of working with our LUT files.

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