Using LUTs in Magic Bullet Looks

Sometimes you feel like a LUT.

LUTs, or Look Up Tables, are a handy way to store and share color adjustments, but they work best when integrated with a complete color correction workflow. In this tutorial, I show you how to use LUTs in Magic Bullet Looks—and then customize them with additional color tweaks, and a couple of tricks that no LUT can do.

Want to try it yourself? You can download the LUT I used in this tutorial below. Stay tuned for more of these short tutorials, including one on how to make your own LUTs like a grown-up.

Frame.io

Frame.io is a web-based media colaboration platform. You can upload video and stills, share them with your colaborators, and comment, annotate, and even draw right on the media to share your feedback. After months of teasing and collecting feedback from beta testers, the service lauches today.

Red Giant used Frame.io on their latest film, Old/New. Here's Director Seth Worley and Executive Producer Aharon Rabinowitz talking about their experience:

I am a big believer in colaboration. There's a lot more potential here than the obvious stuff, like clients reviewing cuts. With a proper online colaboration tool, I believe that filmmakers around the world can do some amazing things together that simply would not be possible any other way.

Frame.io was created by real filmmakers (who happen to be friends of mine) to solve the problems they faced in collaborating around the globe. You can sign up for a free starter account today to try it for yourself.

Lightroom Iron Chef, The Video

Last month, at the Bay Area Lightroom User Group, I got to try something I'd always wanted to do. In front of over 100 people, I used Lightroom to develop 29 mystery photos submitted by members of the audience.

I called it Lightroom Iron Chef, but Jeffrey Friedl described it better:

...Stu Maschwitz sits down to a blacked-out Lightroom catalog loaded with a couple dozen photos submitted by strangers, and one by one he unveils and processes them as the whim strikes him, providing a running commentary about his artistic reasons for doing things, or technical comments about how to achieve in Lightroom whatever look he's going for.

Adobe recorded the presentation, and has graciously allowed me to mirror the video on YouTube for easier viewing. Watch closely for a sneak peek at a forthcoming version of the Prolost Graduated Presets for Lightroom, as well as a bit of a look at how I created the Prolost Bespoke Vintage Presets.

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Slugline Back to School Sale: 40% Off For Two Days

Slugline is on sale! Allow myself to quote myself from the Slugline Blog:

Last year, we received a nice email from a film student at NYU asking about an educational discount. Unfortunately, there’s no mechanism for this in the App Store (except the volume educational pricing, which we do participate in), so we hatched a plan to do a back to school sale that anyone could take advantage of.

Does the timing actually make any sense? Are you even a student? Who cares? Slugline is on sale for 40% off through Thursday. That’s $23.99 instead of the usual $39.99.

Take advantage of this sale whether your definition of “ramen” is microwaved packets or $18 bowls of stewed pork belly.

Lightroom Mobile 1.3 Has a Big New Feature and a Big Old Bug

Adobe quietly updated its mobile version of Lightroom last month. The update includes a highly usable—and even slightly hackable—new feature, and a long-standing bug that can cause your photo adjustments to be lost.

Almost Presets

The headlining feature of Lightroom Mobile 1.3 is the ability to copy and paste settings from one photo to another. It’s handy to be able to make an adjustment to one photo and copy it to others, but the reason I like this feature is that it offers an end run around the image editing limitations imposed on the mobile app.

Lightroom Mobile renders and processes the entire Adobe Camera Raw processing engine, but only allows you to adjust the parameters from the Basic panel in Lightroom’s Develop module. Presets can modify the other parameters, but you are limited to the presets that ship with the mobile app. It’s no secret that I love presets, so what I’ve done in version 1.3 is populate my synced collections with sample photos that use some of my favorite develop presets (including several Prolost Vintage presets). I can now copy and paste the settings from these reference images to any new photo I add. In other words, you can copy and paste Develop settings (from photos edited in the desktop Lightroom) that you cannot otherwise modify using Lightroom Mobile on its own. It’s not quite as good as presets, but it’s better than nothing. I have even created some plain grey images to better show off the settings that I’m copying and pasting.

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I thought I was kinda crazy, hacking this new capability to be a poor cousin to my most-requested Lightroom Mobile feature—until I saw Adobe’s own Russell Brown do exactly the same thing in his Lightroom Mobile 1.3 tutorial.

Clearly I’m not the only one yearning for user presets in Lightroom Mobile.

Develop, Cross a Road, Develop Again

Unfortunately, neither version 1.3.0, nor yesterday's 1.3.1 update, fixes a nasty bug that has long plagued the Lightroom Mobile photo editing process. When you adjust a photo’s Develop settings, Lightroom Mobile does not sync those changes back to the cloud until you exit back to the grid view—even if you exit the app. Your develop settings can therefore be lost rather easily, through normal use of your iOS device.

Imagine this: You open a photo in Lightroom Mobile, make some adjustments, and then a phone call comes in, or an important challenge to beat a friend at Crossy Road. You deal with that, and then you get distracted, and maybe it’s a while before you come back to the Lightroom app. When you return to Lightroom Mobile, your Develop settings are gone—the photo is in its original, unedited state.

What’s happened is that Lightroom has quietly quit in the background—as every iOS app does, by requirement—but without having synced your settings. I have reported this bug to Adobe, and they tell me they are working on a fix. But for now, be careful to always exit back to grid view (or choose Force Sync from the little Cloud menu) to ensure a sync of any Develop adjustments that you don’t want to lose.

Lightroom Mobile is free in the App Store, and requires a Creative Cloud subscription. For a complete list of the new features in version 1.3, see Lightroom Product Manager Sharad Mangalick’s blog post.