- When it comes to making your footage from Ecamm
look the best it possibly can in Zoom,
you have a LUT of options.
(upbeat music)
I recently discovered that you can use LUTs
within Ecamm Live and today I wanted to show you
how to do that, and also how to make your own custom LUTs
so that way you don't have to just borrow something else,
someone else is using,
you can use something that's very unique to you
and your specific set up.
And if you're asking yourself, what the LUT is a LUT,
it's basically just sort of a preset,
you can get very technical with them,
you can use any LUTs that you want with Ecamm.
So if you already have some, or if you've already made some,
you can use those.
But it's really fun to learn how to make your own,
so we're gonna be using Photoshop to do that.
And basically, it's just a preset to help your colors
look their best.
This is what this shot looks like directly
out of the camera, I'm using the Canon EOS R,
on a standard picture profile, so it doesn't look bad,
it's super usable, but, once I add my color correction to it
in Final Cut Pro, this is what looks like here
and I like this because it's so bright and vibrant.
I like things that are bright and vibrant
and that's kind of where I lean towards my color grading.
So then when I jump into a Zoom meeting,
and the Zoom meeting is dark and contrasty,
it's sort of a bummer.
So the fact that you can fix that in Ecamm
is really awesome.
The first part of this video is gonna be
all about how to creative your own custom LUT
in Photoshop, and the second part will be
how to use it in Ecamm and then Zoom through Ecamm.
So feel free to use the chapter marker down at the bottom
to skip to where you need to go and let's jump into it.
Right now, I am in Zoom and Ecamm,
so we've got Ecamm on the left side of the screen,
Zoom on the right, it's the same footage
but what you might notice is that the colors
are slightly different.
If we look at Zoom, the colors kind of have more contrast
and are a little darker, whereas Ecamm,
they're a little bit brighter and really more accurate
to what's coming out of the camera.
Now the first step towards creating a custom LUT
is to get a single frame as a reference image
that you can put into Photoshop.
There are a few ways to do this,
you can just record for a few seconds and then open up
that clip and take a screenshot of it,
but I really recommend that you put that footage
into your editing software, and then export a frame.
So for example, I've got a clip in Final Cut Pro
from a previous video that I made,
and it doesn't really matter where you position
the play head, as long as the shot, the framing,
the colors, the environment, is what you wanna work with,
because if I had to spend a bunch of time trying to get a
cool expression on my face in a video,
that would just take forever.
So it doesn't really matter what the frame is,
as long as it's the location and the setting
that you wanna use for your coloring.
And then all you need to do is click the Share button,
and Save Current Frame.
Now it's important to know that
the Save Current Frame option is not enabled by default,
so if you don't have it, you just need to go
into your Final Cut Pro Preferences,
click on Destinations, and then you can add a destination
and you can add a Current Frame.
And when you do that it will also let you select
the type of file that you wanna save the frame as.
And it's always a good idea for this specific use case,
to save it as a TIFF image.
That's gonna make things easy as you go to create
your own custom LUT.
And now once you've done that
and you can click the Share button,
the Save Current Frame option will be there.
And now we're ready to hop into Photoshop.
Once you've got your frame open in Photoshop,
the first step is to turn it into a background layer,
which all you need to do is click on Layer
on the very top, New, and then Background from Layer.
You're gonna see the little lock show up on your image
and it's gonna say background,
that's gonna be really important just to make sure
that things don't get messed up
later on in the process.
From there, you're basically
just working with Adjustment Layers.
So on top of your background,
you can click, Adjustments, and then you just,
for lack of a better term, play with these until
it looks the way that you want it to look.
There are very technical ways to go about creating
technically correct LUTs, and if you're familiar
with color grading and image coloring and all that,
this is the time to do that.
If not, you can do what I kinda do,
which move things around until you like the way they look.
So my goal with this image, personally,
is to add in a bit brightness and contrast,
and maybe a little bit of saturation.
So, I'm gonna start with Levels,
and just play around until it looks the way that I want.
This is not unlike the way that I would just edit
a still image in Photoshop.
Once you work on an Adjustment Layer there,
it adds it above your Background Layer
and you click the little eye to turn it on and off
to see your adjustments.
You don't have to do every single one of these,
you can go through and just work on the ones
that you want, I start with levels,
curves is usually a good one to kind of adjust the exposure
a little bit more.
I am looking at my skin tone a little bit,
but I'm really looking at the room around me,
and the vibrance and the color, and that sort of stuff.
I want my colors to be vibrant.
And I'm gonna up the saturation a little bit.
If you decide you don't want an Adjustment Layer,
you can just click the trashcan and delete it.
Hue and Saturation, that's usually a fun one,
you can kinda play around a little more.
Change my wall a little bit,
lean it towards more of like a teal,
rather than a purple-ish.
Color balance can be important,
especially if maybe the white balance isn't exactly
what you want in the original shot.
I always personally push things a little
towards the cooler end of the spectrum,
mostly just because I'm so cool.
I wouldn't wanna be too hot.
And like I said before, you don't have to go through
every single Adjustment Layer,
you can use maybe just one or two,
if you wanna use all of them, go for it,
but here's our original image,
and then as I start adding in my different adjustments,
you can see how those all change.
And if anything, I would actually recommend that you push
your adjustments maybe a little further
than you normally would, because once you've added
the LUT in Ecamm, it's easy to then tone it down
a little bit, but you can't boost it.
Once you're happy with the image, now you can save it
as a LUT.
The first step is to go File, click on Export,
and then do Color Lookup Tables,
and that'll bring up this dialogue window
right here where you can give your LUT a name,
I'm gonna call mine, Tom Buck Lut.TIFF.
And keep it at 64 Grid Points on High Quality.
For Formats, I just use CUBE,
it works great with Ecamm,
it also works with Final Cut Pro,
so if you wanna start making your own LUTs for Final Cut,
you can do that.
So now on my Desktop, I have a document
that says, Tom buck Lut.tiff.CUBE,
and that is my LUT that I ready to use.
And now in Ecamm, it is super easy to add the LUT.
The first thing, I think I point, wait,
you just need to click this little magic wand right here,
and that's going to bring up
all of your image adjustment options, which is pretty cool,
because Ecamm has some built in ones you can
play with the brightness, color temperature, tint,
you can actually make some pretty decent adjustments,
actually I'm making things look quite terrible right now.
But you can have a lot of control over your image
without using a LUT or anything,
I'm gonna reset this because that looks terrible.
So to add the LUT that you've just made or
one that you already have, just click on Select LUT.
And then there it is, Tom Buck LUT, and Open.
And now, boom, the LUT is enabled in Ecamm.
And you can see the image looks a lot brighter,
this little slider will allow you to adjust the intensity
of your LUT.
So, if I slide it down, you're gonna all the way
back to zero, which would be the original image.
Or I can kind of like, feather it in as much as I want.
If I want it to be subtle or I can just max it out
and have it look as intense as possible.
And basically now, it almost looks like I'm working
with color graded or color corrected footage
in Ecamm Live, which is super cool.
And there's a big difference there,
the original footage looks fine,
but for me, the LUT really makes things come alive and pop.
And just as I mentioned in my Ecamm and Zoom video,
the way that you use Ecamm with Zoom
is to click on Output, turn on Virtual Cam,
and then Ecamm will be a selectable source within Zoom.
So now, with no LUT active,
you can see the difference again, in color,
Ecamm looks a little more vibrant,
Zoom looks a little more contrasty and darker.
And once I add in that LUT, they both brighten up.
So again, this is one of those reasons
why I recommend going little intense with your LUT
if you know that you're gonna be using it with Zoom,
because it's easy to then back off and kind of get
to the exact point that you want.
But if you notice that you've maxed out your LUT
and Zoom is still crushing your colors too much,
you have nowhere else to go.
On top of the LUT,
then you can play with the brightness some more.
I should mention though,
right now I have my LUT on the desktop,
if I were to move it into a folder
and then reopen Ecamm, the LUT wouldn't be there anymore,
so I have to re-add it from the new folder.
So I just recommend, every time that you open Ecamm,
before you start streaming, Zooming, whatever,
double check that your LUT is active and enabled.
I know that was a LUT of information to throw at you,
so if you wanna make things easier,
I'll actually put a link down in the description
where you can download the LUT that I made here for free,
and use it if you want.
It may or may not work out well for you
because it's based on my room, my studio, my preferences,
but it's at least something to play around with
and get your feet wet in the world of LUTs.
And if you wanna know more about using Ecamm with Zoom,
I did an entire video all about it,
and I also made a video about my ridiculous,
over the top, super unnecessary, but really fun Zoom set up.
So you can check those out.
And all that's left to say, I guess is,
good night and good LUT.
(upbeat music)