AdamStanislav

I was just looking through a .zip collection of some LUTs I made a while ago, and found this one from 2018. It is a very simple LUT, where the idea was to make a regular photo look like it was taken in the evening. As I said, it is very simple, it just changes the red, green, and yellow vertices into r=0.5, g=0.5, b=0.5, which is an oversimplified method of making those three vertices gray. Anyway, here is the LUT, GoodEvening.cube, and here is the sample photo,

And just for the heck of it (and because I was curious what it would do), here is Antipasto Anti-Pastel.cube, the opposite of Pastel. After all, for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.

Well, since we have been talking about Pantone pastels in other threads today, I thought I’d try to make a Pastel.cube LUT:

Errare non caninum sed humanum est.

Thanks. One minor point to the best of my non-native English speaker knowledge, the second color in your palette should be called Fuchsia Rose, not Fuschia Rose. 🙀

If you guessed Rhapsody.cube is in blue, give yourself a medal. 😉

There is a reason Times Square looks that way: People will not notice signs unless they stand out and scream at you to notice them. I am a psychologist and can assure you we all tend to ignore the surroundings we are familiar with because we expect them to be the same as before and we feel safe from predators (going all the way back to before we moved to the cities). If we had to notice everything, our brains would have to work overtime, we would need more food, and we would get exhausted all the time. Ironically, though, people who live in or often visit the Times Square area become familiar with all the flashy signs and do not notice them anymore. The trick then is to make a sign that does not look like the familiar surroundings. If the walls are red, the blue sign is more likely to be noticed (and it also looks much better). If the walls are essentially light bluish gray as so many walls are, the red sign will stand out (unless there already are other red signs on the wall). If a sign is important, it has to stand out and be in your face the first few times people walk by it. After that, it will become familiar and they will no longer notice it. But hopefully by then the message will sink in and will be followed without the need to be reminded that it is there (if it does, then the sign needs to be changed regularly).

And this, rifreddami, would be sort of the opposite of scaldami. rifreddami.cube

Here is another one I just cooked up today. Called scaldami, it kind of warms everything up but in such a subtle way that the average person will not notice the colors have been manipulated. At least I don’t think they will. scaldami.cube

Glad you like it. 😀

Sometimes, just sometimes, I like to produce a LUT so out of whackOut-of-Whack.cube that even I end up looking like this when I see the result: The reason I am shocked is that I can never predict what it does to an image. Some images look like posters, others completely wild, and, quite surprisingly, some completely distort some of the parts of the image, while keeping other parts almost identical to the original.

I think the blue one looks better, but the first one is more likely to be noticed. So, as much as it pains me, I would have to go with the red one.

Well, looks like the storm/tornado is mostly South of here and is moving South-East, so my town seems lucky. Anyway, if we go exactly 180 degrees around the color circle from the above Orange Juice, we get captured half-way between Azure and Cobalt. And since I have no idea what the official name of that sextary color is, or whether there even is such an official name, I could not escape from naming it Azcoban. Here are the five LUTs using it, in the same order of TF, HF, HX, ZF, ZX as with Orange Juice. They are the exact complements of Orange Juice: Azcoban.zip

We had a big storm two nights ago, lost power for 7 hours. Another one is coming in an hour or so, so I better type this fast. I decided to try something new and make a LUT filter with the color that is half-way between orange and orange peel. Those are quintary colors, so I wanted to squeeze a sixtary color from them. I am not aware of any official name for it, so I just called it Orange Juice. I made five LUTs using that color. Here is the basic OJ (the one with TF at the end of its name in the enclosed .zip): Here is the one with HF in its name: Here is the Xtreme version of same (HX): And here are ZF and ZX: OrangeJuice.zip

Awesome! Thanks for sharing that. 😉

I make some SVG clip art for openclipart.org. I create it in Affinity Designer and export it to SVG. I always have to make sure it is pure vector art because openclipart.org does not accept SVG files that contain bitmaps. I also have to make sure to convert all text to curves because there is no guarantee anyone who downloads it will have the same fonts I do. After I have exported everything, I open the SVG in my text editor and cut out everything I can to make the file as small as possible. Most of it is just simple shapes, like this Cool Cellface thing: At other times, it is just some text, like this little joke: Affinity Designer is really good at designing clip art, though its SVG exports could be more optimized (luckily I am perfectly capable of optimizing them myself, but it takes extra effort).

One of the popular filters in film and video making is Bleach Bypass, so called because it was achieved by skipping the bleach step in film developing (in the lab, that is). Nowadays, film is rarely used, but here is my impression of that effect, and the LUT I made for it: Bleach Bypass.cube

And just to prove my earlier point that a LUT is not a matrix, I have extracted a matrix from the above LUT. A matrix can be converted into a LUT, but going the opposite way is only possible if the LUT was originally created from a matrix. Nevertheless, I extracted that portion of the LUT that would be representing the matrix if it was created from one. And the result is horrible because I had to throw out one half of the LUT to reduce it to a matrix:

And here I was trying yet something different, interpolating the image against a grayscale LUT, trying to find a combination that would bring out human skin and hair regardless of the color of the skin or hair (I mean natural color), while subduing other colors. Much to my surprise, using the raspberry color got me right into the middle of the range of skin colors. So, here it is, TF-Skin.cube

Why, thank you! That’s a very nice compliment.

Last night I was thinking I should try something new: Use my 48-color filter technique in the opposite way, i.e., instead of interpolating an existing LUT against one of the default LUTs, maybe I should interpolate it against another LUT, or perhaps interpolate one of the defaults against a LUT (which is not the same as interpolating a LUT against a default, kind of like 2-1 is not the same as 1-2). I added that ability to my software, then tried various combinations all day long. While doing that I found one of my LUTs from 2019, similar to the dichromatic LUT I already showed here, but this one has increased contrast and even some saturation to deal with with the loss of both in the original dichromatic due to it being an optical illusion. The one I found I had called Dichromega: I then interpolated it against the default but was not happy with the result, so I tried the aforementioned opposite (interpolated the default against it) and that looked better. I only did it with the six primary and secondary colors, then converted it and the six interpolations into the .cube format and compressed the result in the enclosed zip file. Dichromega.zip

Very nice. And thanks, your pictures bring back many memories.

Here is another one. Suppose we turn all colors in an image 90 degrees, and only after that do we apply the 48 color filters I have been playing with all this time. If we then load, say, the emerald filter, will it let the emerald colors through, or the colors that were close to the emerald in the original picture but have since been modified by the 90-degree-LUT? Before you look at the picture, here is a hint: The filter is applied to the original 90-degree LUT, not to the image produced by that LUT. It is sort of like a painter holding a palette on which he normally has eight inks, black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow. He uses his brush to mix any desired color from the eight inks. But today someone has swapped the six inks other than black and white with some other inks, but he does not notice it (maybe he is a computer or some kind of robot that just does what he is programmed to do). So he keeps mixing his colors as usual, in the same proportion of the eight inks as he always does for this painting. And that is what happens when we apply a filter to an existing LUT, which represents his palette, albeit modified. OK, so here is the emerald filter applied not to the original image but to the palette (LUT) that had all its colors rotated by 90 degrees: 90Degrees.zip

Just having a little more fun today to make an example how a lot of math can be squeezed into a simple LUT: So what is the math I mentioned? Well, first we take the red, green, and blue values of each pixel. We then convert them from the RGB color space to the YCC color space using the current Rec. 2020 method for that (YCC was originally created for color TV, so they could transfer the old monochrome signal Y to those who only had a B&W TV set, while adding the two C channels that can be used to convert that B&W signal to color). After that conversion, we rotate the C and C (generally called chroma) by the angle of 17 degrees. We then interpolate the result with an unrotated chroma, so we effectively end up with only 11% of the 17 degrees (in other words, the chroma is now rotated by about 1.78 degrees). After that we multiply the chroma by 0.7231, which cuts down the saturation to 72.31% of its original. We then stretch the Y channel to the span from the black of -0.05 (instead of the original 0) to the white of 1.1 (instead of the original 1). This increases the contrast by 15% and the brightness by 10%. Then we convert everything back from the Rec 2020 YCC color model to the RGB color model. And instead of doing all that math for every single pixel, we now have a simple LUT which is much easier to apply to each pixel than all that complicated math. ChromaFun.cube

Oh, I always forget to mention that some of these LUTs, especially in the Liebestraum collection are very strong (especially the dark blue ones), but you can always make them look good by using the strength slider (I believe Affinity Photo calls it the lowering of the opacity of the adjustment layer). By the way I see my pet peeve in Affinity help. It claims a LUT works a matrix. Not true! The word matrix has a very specific meaning in mathematics, as does a look-up table. And they are not the same. Just because both have columns and rows does not make them even close to being the same. Some effects are indeed produced by a matrix, but they are a different thing. A matrix represents a linear function or a set of linear functions. Generally, they are used to solve sets of linear equations with multiple variables. A look-up table represents an interpolation or a set of interpolations. When I was in high school back in the Sixties, there were no personal computers, so we had entire printed and bound books of look-up tables for the trigonometric functions (and other LUT books for logarithms and such). A sine, cosine, tangent, etc, none of those are linear functions. Neither are logarithms. As such, they cannot be defined by a matrix. But they sure can be approximated very closely by those look-up tables. So come on, Serif! You have the famous University of Nottingham nearby, consult with its mathematicians before making such wild claims in your help documentation.