Welcome back to another very exciting tutorial here at the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com.
My name is Jesus Ramirez and you can find me on Twitter @JRfromPTC.
In this video, we're going to talk about Color Lookup Tables. Color Lookup Tables allow us
to apply a photographic effect with a click of a button. Color Lookup Tables are usually
used in video, but you can use them in Photoshop, as well.
You can create a Color Lookup Table Adjustment by clicking on the New Adjustment Layer icon
and selecting Color Lookup. This is going to give you these options here with three
different dropdowns, and each of these dropdowns is going to contain a list of L.U.T. files Look
Up Tables. And you can select any one of these, for example, Filmstock, and that applies an
Effect to the image. Another one that I like is Teal Orange, this is more of that movie
look effect, and Lookup Tables really don't have any settings. Once you apply it, you,
really, don't have anything to adjust, besides the usual adjustments that you can do to any
Layer, for example, the Opacity or the Blend Mode. Some of the Blend Modes that I like
using alongside Lookup Tables are Soft Light, Overlay, and Luminosity and Color.
Let's talk about Color first. Color allows you to keep the colors bound in the Lookup
Table of the Luminosity of your original Layer. Luminosity allows you to use the Luminance
Values of the Lookup Table but the colors of the original Layer. And, of course, you
can try any of the other Blend Modes, just in case you find something that you like.
I want to come back into the normal channel, and I'm just quickly going to show you a few
others, for example, EdgyAmber and NightfromDay. So as you can see, Lookup Tables could be
very useful, especially when you start implementing them with Opacity and different Blend Modes.
And as I mentioned earlier, you have more under the two dropdown menus, for example,
this here and this here, as well.
And now that we're talking about the dropdowns, one of the things that I do have to mention
is that the abstract dropdown is different between the Mac and PC versions of Photoshop.
The Mac version of Photoshop contains more Color Lookup Tables, so you can apply more
effects if you are on the Mac. This is a screenshot comparing the two different versions. As you
can see, there's more on the Mac. So this is, actually, one of the few differences in
Photoshop between Mac and PC. There aren't too many, but this is one of them. Anyway,
not only can you use the Lookup Tables that come with Photoshop, you can create your own.
Let me show you how you can create your own Lookup Table. I'm going to delete that Layer
and you can create a Lookup Table by using Adjustment Layers. Anyone of these Adjustment
Layers will help you create a Lookup Table. For example, the Curves Adjustment Layer,
I can use that to apply Medium Contrast to the image. Then I can use another Curves Adjustment
Layer and, maybe, this time I'll set it to Color, so we only affect the color of the
image and not the Luminance values. We'll go into the Blue Channel and we'll add some
Blue to the dark colors and some Yellow to the brighter colors. Then I'll go to the Red
Channel and I'll add some Cyan to the dark colors and some Red to the brighter colors.
I think the Effect is too strong, I can, also, bring down the Opacity just a bit, and I can
even use Pale Layers, Solid Color to create a Lookup Table. So, maybe, I can select the
Green color, maybe a color like this one, press OK, and then choose Soft Light, and
I don't want this adjustment to affect the Blacks and Whites, so I'm going to double
click to the right side of the Layer to bring up the Layer Style Window and we're going
to use the Blender Sliders, and use the Luminosity of these Layers to decide where to apply the
adjustments.
So, hold Alt, Option on the Mac, split the two Blend If Sliders, which use Luminance
values of the Layer you're on, or the underlying Layer to hide the effect of the Layer you
have selected. In this case, by splitting these two in half, by holding Alt, Option
on the Mac, you can make the Effect fade in the dark areas, so that's what I'm doing.
And I also want to do that in the brighter areas; Alt, Option on the Mac, Click, split
those into two and you see how the effect starts disappearing in the brighter areas.
That's before, and that's after. I'm going to press OK, and, again, this might be a little
too strong, so I'm going to bring down the Opacity just a bit, maybe around 67%, and,
maybe, this is the effect that I want to go for. This is going to be my new LUT file.
I'm going to select the top layer. Hold Shift, Click on the bottom one and press Ctrl G,
Command G on the Mac, to turn that into a Group. With the Group selected, I'm going
to show you how to Export a Lookup Table, but this first time, it's not going to work
and you'll see why in a moment.
I'm going to go into File, Export, Color Lookup Tables, and Photoshop is going to tell me
that it cannot create a Lookup Table because there's no background found. I'm going to
press OK; so I'm going to Click on Layer 0 and go into Layer, New, Background from Layer,
and that turns this Layer into a Background. Notice the word Background here and the icon
are locked to the right. You may already have a Background Layer, but in case youíre working
with layers, I wanted to show you how to create a Background Layer. So you'll never going
to click on the Group, which is our Lookup Table, so I'll just call this LUT, just so
we know what that is, and then I'm going to go into File, Export, Color Lookup Tables.
You can enter a Description. I can just call it Lookup-tables.psd, that's fine. You can
enter a Copyright, if you like, and use lowercase file extensions if you like. I, usually, have
this checked. The quality High is good for me and this is the format, the file type that
you're going to use to create that LUT file. More often than not, you're probably are going
to use ICC profile, simply because that profile is not Color Mode dependent, meaning, that
you can use it with any Color ModeóRGB, CMYK, LAB, whatever you have. If you don't use ICC,
you might also want to use CUBE, but I'll use ICC for now, then I'm going to press OK.
Photoshop is going to ask me where I want to save the Lookup Table files. That's fine
for me here. I'm just going to click on Save and that's going to save my Lookup Table.
Now, I'm going to disable the visibility of the Group that I created, then I'm going to
go to Color Lookup and I'm going to load the Lookup Table that we just created. If you
created an ICC file like I did, then you're going to find it under Device Link; if not,
you're going to, probably, find it under here, so just click on Load 3D LUT, and in this
case, I'm going to click on Load Device Link Profile and click on the .icc file, then I'm
going to click on Load and Photoshop is immediately going to load that Lookup Table and the same
look we had before. I'm going to click on the Background Layer, Drag it over to the
New Layer icon to duplicate it, put that on top of the LUT folder, and I'm going to select
these two files by holding Shift and clicking them both, pressing Ctrl G, Command G on the
Mac, and turn that into a Group. Now we have all the Layers enabled so we can see both
versions. As you can see, there is no difference. The same Color Effect that we created by applying
these three Adjustment Layers is now being applied by one Color Lookup Table Adjustment
Layer. And, of course, with this Adjustment Layer, you can still use the Opacity, and
even Blend Modes.
Keep in mind that when you're creating Lookup Tables you can pretty much use all of these
Adjustment Layers, including a Color Lookup Table Adjustment Layer. So you can create
Lookup Table Adjustment Layers by using other Color Lookup Adjustment Layers. And now that
you created your own Lookup Table, you can not only use it on Photoshop, but you can
use it in Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere, Adobe SpeedGrade and many other applications
that use Color Lookup Tables.
And that's it for this tutorial. I hope that you enjoyed it and that you learned something
new. If you have any comments or questions, leave them down below. Don't forget to subscribe
and share this video with a friend. Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you again
soon.