Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Lightroom presets are all around us, you might love them as a 1 click solution to your batch editing needs or you might think that they are useless and all the photos where one was used look the same.
Still, the truth is they are here to stay and maybe we should start thinking of how to integrate them into our professional workflows as more than crutches for the following Instagram post.
Sony has released a new Version 2.00 firmware update for the Sony FX3 mirrorless cinema camera. The new update adds some of Sony’s professional cinema line features into the camera, including additional LOG shooting modes, the ability to import your own LUTs as well as timecode sync for when you’re shooting multiple cameras.
The new LOG shooting modes with LUT monitoring, Sony says, “create a smoother post production workflow by enabling Cine El, Cine El Quick and Flexible ISO modes for recording with the S-Log3 gamma curve”, letting you get a more useful preview of your shot while maximising the dynamic range of the recording itself.
Lookup Tables (LUTs) are a wonderful feature of most video editing software. They’re sort of like presets that allow you to get a consistent look across multiple clips that when edited together form a sequence. They allow you to remap one set of colours and brightnesses to another.
Generally, there are two different types of LUTs. Corrective LUTs and creative ones. This particular video from Nathaniel Dodson is more about creative LUTs. Looks that you can give to your videos for artistic effect. He shows us two ways to create them using the Infinite Color Panel, as well as manually with adjustment layers.
LUTs have become a big thing recently. Once only used for grading video, they’ve become extremely popular for regular photography, too. Photoshop’s been able to read LUTs since at least CS6. But in CC it can also create them, too.
In this video from Unmesh Dinda at Piximperfect, we see how to quickly and easy create LUT files from within Photoshop. From there we can either install them as “filters” for use on future images, or we can even use them in Premiere, Resolve and other editing applications for video, too.
LUTs, or Look-Up Tables, were relatively unheard of until a few years ago. Now they’re everywhere. It’s like everybody has a LUT pack available for download. But, just as with Lightroom presets, LUTs are not a magic bullet. They can’t make a bad shot look amazing, and they can’t relight your scene.
This video from Casey Faris is a follow-up to an April Fool prank he posted at the beginning of this month. The prank was about the new Pegasus “Magic LUT”. It was an amusing video, but quite a few people fell for some of the things mentioned early on in the video. This time, he breaks LUTs right down to cover exactly what they can and can’t do.
Colour wheels are fairly common to video editing applications. Lately, they seem to have started popping up in still image editing applications, too through the use of various plugins. With the line between photography and video becoming somewhat blurred over the last few years, it’s really not much of a surprise. Photographers are making the transition to video, and filmmakers using DSLRs to film are shooting more stills. So, it creates a familiar bridge between the two.
But, colour wheels can seem a little intimidating for colour correction if you’ve never used them before. Often misunderstood, they’re an extremely powerful tool. Theo at Miesner Media has put together a video to show how they work. While the video demonstrates their use in Davinci Resolve, the same techniques work in virtually all video editing applications and plugins that offer colour wheels.
Video has become a part of daily life for many photographers. For some, it’s because we’ve expanded our services for clients. For others, it’s simply for our own self promotion. Tips and tricks, tutorials or behind the scenes videos for YouTube & Facebook. One of the biggest problems many photographers starting out with video face is learning a whole new set of software – and the extra cost of said software.
Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve, an industry standard for colour grading, has recently started to add editing capabilities. While there are $30K and $1K options of the software available, there’s also a completely free version. Between expanded capability, and a super low price tag, it’s no wonder it’s become such a popular tool. But it can be a complex beast to get to grips with. In this video from Learn Color Grading, we’re taken on a 30 minute whirlwind tour of Resolve’s UI, and how it all works.
Lookup Tables, or LUTs, are simply amazing. LUTs are like presets, but work across all platforms and software, for both video and stills. LUTs can be used for both colour correction, to bring cameras to a standard, and for giving your footage or images a desired “look”. But how do we use them?
In this video from Casey Faris, we see how to use LUTs for both correction and grading for video. Using both DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere Pro, Casey walks us through the whole process.
3D LUTs, or Look-up Tables, are nothing new. They’ve been common in the digital film industry for a good while, but it seems only recently that they’re starting to be embraced by individual filmmakers and photographers.
But what are 3D Luts? Put simply, they’re a tonemap. They take the hue, saturation and brightness (hence “3D”) values of each pixel in your image, and change those values into to something else.
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