From the course: Creating Presets, LUTs, and Profiles for Video Pros

Creating a LUT with 3D LUT Creator

From the course: Creating Presets, LUTs, and Profiles for Video Pros

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Creating a LUT with 3D LUT Creator

- If you're looking for a cool piece of standalone software to create LUTs, there's a useful tool that I like. It's called 3D LUT Creator, and it's available for both Mac and PC. Let's go ahead and open up an image here. And I've got a reference frame from a time lapse sequence. And I can see the shot and easily start to make adjustments. You'll find simple tools here to allow you to set the white balance and the ability to add in all sorts of simple things, such as the contrast, saturation, and others. You can also start to really get refined here and work with these individual points to emphasize them. For example, I'm bringing out the really rich reds and purples, but I'm going to tone down the blues a bit. And notice how we can start to really compress the color. Now, there are different ways of viewing this. And I can easily switch between different color spaces to manipulate the color in a way that feels more natural. And this works quite nicely, but there is another feature that I like altogether and that is the ability to load in a reference image that you want to use to influence things. So I'm going to choose this landscape photograph that has bright outdoors. And I really like the color temperature here and the lighting conditions. If I click Compare between these two, I can see 'em side by side. And this one just feels like a studio shot, which it was. And I want to make it take on some of the properties of this outdoor lighting. Under the Edit menu here, I could choose to match the colors to the reference image and it will analyze that image and pick up some of the properties. You'll see that it did some extreme pushing here for the lighting conditions, so you might need to back these off just a little, but it does allow you to start to pick up things. In this case, though, I don't want to redistribute the hue, so I'll just change the method here to nearest. And you see, I can redistribute the hue and how much is locked. There we go. That's looking better now. And I can start to match the luminance so it picks up the exposure and a little bit of curve to bring in that color cast. I like that. Now, looking at everything else here, you can still refine to tweak this if you decide to. Notice that the different options will change how it's applied. I'm also going to affect this so it doesn't go quite so broad, but instead applies it to a smaller range. And now the lighting is looking like outdoor lighting, which is cool. You can continue to play here with different models for the color and, of course, tweak and move these around. Let's go with the LAB model, for example. And we'll do just a little shift there. And now I've got a good red point that I like. When satisfied, I can click OK and the match is applied. Now with a simple click, I could choose to save the 3D LUT. And you can go in and store that and choose from a wide range of formats. 3D LUT Creator is a very advanced tool that has a lot of options. So if you want to explore it more in depth, I invite you to try the demo version and make sure you take a look at their documentation. But some of its tools for editing LUTs and really getting in and being fine tuning at the smallest level are quite attractive.

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