POV: The Usefulness of LUTs

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy | All Rights Reserved

I had no idea what a LUT was until recently when I started to post process my photographs using ON1, a well regarded photo editing software. LUT is the acronym for Look Up Table, and is a file that converts a range of colors in an image to another range of colors...in essence, they're filters which can help in achieving a certain look and feel.

LUTs are incredibly useful to photographers who - like me - are loath in spending tons of time fiddling with their photographs in order to achieve the result they seek. You can describe them as presets or filters, if you like...so these are typically applied as a filter or a layer within photo editing programs.

They are calibrated to work with properly exposed images, and can help with color grading, but not necessarily with color correction. LUTs are good at creating vintage, cinematic and matte looks (color grading stuff), some black and white looks as well as split toning...but they they can’t do a good job at things like adjusting highlights and shadows, nor sharpening, blurring, noise reduction et al.

Here's a screen grab of the above photograph that I made in Shanghai with the help of Tian Yi Yi who took the role of Ruan Ling-Yu, the late actress who was the subject of my photo-shoot. 

I used one of my favorite LUTs that I created and called Old Style YiYi. It gives the photograph a color grading that I sought to impart a sense of warm "old world" which matched the color of the wood of the windows.

The original photograph straight out of the camera (in this case Fuji GFX50R/45mm) and un-cropped is here:

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy | All Rights Reserved