AdamStanislav

Maybe in his previous life he was a celebrity haunted by the paparazzi? 🙀

Well, I’ve written a few new routines to my library (have not uploaded them yet, though), which allowed me to create an entire series of LUTs derived from one base LUT. And today I tried to see what would happen if I changed the farba (again, that is red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow vertices) in a way that is normally used to increase the contrast, but kept the svit (black, white) at the defaults. The result was kind of a dreamy look. I wish I could show you some of the pictures I tested it on, alas I do not have the right to post them, so I will show it again on the stock image: I spent several hours staring at the various images with this LUT applied, while listening to Liszt’s Liebestraum (because the images looked dreamy) over and over, trying to figure out the nature of the effect, which seemed very familiar but I could not think of the name. And then it hit me. The LUT was acting like a diffuser, making it look like the pictures were taken with a much softer light than they actually were. This surprised me because I was always assuming the only way to achieve such an effect would be softening the image by averaging neighboring pixels, not by manipulating each pixel on its own, let alone with such a simple LUT! More importantly, however, the program I wrote applies filters of the 48 colors from primary to quintary (I know Wikipedia calls it quinary, but as a graduate of the last department of the last Roman university that still had all of its lectures in Latin, I cannot stand that word but am willing to compromise on quintary). It applies the filters by interpolating the base LUT using two sets of interpolation values, one that I called F for filter, the other X for extreme filter. And what does it interpolate with? Well, three separate LUTs. One is the default Identity LUT (i.e., one that does not change anything) which I marked I, the other is LUT of just zeros in everything in the farba department, which I marked O and one is what I call the Home LUT which I marked H. And so we have 6 times 48 = 288 LUTs in addition to the base LUT. Enjoy! Liebestraum.zip

Not too far from my favorite city, I see.

Oh, why not. Here is the same for the 48 primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and quinary colors. It should be useful for many things. I have just made it and only tested two o r three, so please let me know how they are. Quints.zip

And just for the heck of it, I have just tried what an amber-style LUT might do. Just look at it in a text editor to see its simplicity. Here is the result: Amber.cube

Well, I’m actually trying to let everyone know how to make your own LUTs. For example, If you look at Rust.cube in a plain text editor, you will see the black vertex (line 5) is 0 0 0, which is the default black. And the white vertex (line 12) is 1 1 1, the default white. That tells us the brightness and the contrast remain the same, no matter what the rest of the lines are. And indeed, all the other lines are 0.5803921819 0.270588249 0.1411764771, which is roughly a rust color. That tells us that every pixel, regardless of its original color, will be set to that rust color, but will keep its original brightness. And we know that if we keep black and white at its default values and replace all the rest with identical lines, we can have the same effect as this for any color we want. It could be blue, it could be sepia, it could be anything. And we can do that in a plain text editor. We need to keep the header (lines 1-4) as is, except we can change the text between the quotation marks in the first line. Line 14 is just a comment which we can discard. And now you can create any number of effects. Rust.cube

Here is an example of what I am talking about, one of my favorite LUTs to produce a dramatic look: You can examine the LUT, cp.cube in a plain text editor. Lines 5-12 contain the actual LUT, in the order of black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white. That order is specified by the .cube specs, not by me. Each line contains three numbers, for the red, green and blue channels (in that order). You will see that black has values slightly below zero and white slightly above one, which increases the overall contrast of the image. Red, green, and blue have small values, which makes them darker. Cyan, magenta, and yellow have 0.7549019605 where there would be a 0 by default. That makes them lighter (this may seem counter-intuitive, but to make red, green and blue less pronounced you bring them down from 1 to a smaller value, while to make cyan, magenta, and yellow less pronounced you bring them up from 0 to a larger value). And the result is quite dramatic, I’d say. cp.cube

It might actually be the LUTs. Since I developed a software library to create and apply LUTs, I can tell how easy it is (for the computer) to apply a simple small LUT and how complicated it is to apply larger LUTs. The problem with many LUTs is that people who create them start by producing a certain effect and when they like the result then and only then do they export the result to a LUT, often not quite understanding the math behind a LUT, and they think the larger the better. Even Affinity Photo, sadly, seems to have a slider it calls Quality, which implies that larger LUTs are better. I said seems to because I do not have it, so I am just going by what I saw in the official tutorials. My approach is the opposite. I start with the LUT that is like a cube with eight vertices, then I move the vertices to achieve the desired effect. It is very rare that I need a more complex LUT than the basic cube. I developed an entire working model, which I really should write the docs for, but essentially there are eight vertices: black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow. Of them I refer to the black and white vertices as the svit (which is hard to translate from my language but essentially it has to do with intensity of the light). If you adjust those two vertices, you can change the overall brightness and contrast of the image with out affecting the colors. The other six vertices I refer to as farba (which literally means color in Slovak). Adjusting any of those will affect the colors but has little effect on the overall brightness and contrast of the image. And I just love playing with it. After all, I’m 71, and we are supposed to be like children after a certain age. 👴 The math behind the LUT is a simple 3D interpolation, which is quite simple with a cube. The larger LUTs effectively cut the cube into many smaller cubes and the computer has to figure out for every single pixel which of the small cubes to apply to that particular cube. A photo can consist of millions of pixels, so it takes extra time to apply a larger LUT even in a very fast computer. Now imagine a video which has 24-60 frames per second, each frame with a million or more pixels, so to apply a slow big LUT to just a ten-minute video takes a very long time. And since I make videos, I needed to speed the process up and that is why I came up with the idea of the LUT being the starting point of color grading rather than just an afterthought.

Or if we want something wild, also back in 2018, I tried to convert colors to what a vampire might see. I called the result Vampyrectomy (which literally means surgically cutting out the vampire disease, which, I guess, is the opposite of what I was trying to create): Vampyrectomy.cube

It is always smart to deal with a doctor who does not keep you in the dark. So you did the right thing.

As long as I’m at it, back in 2018 I wanted to produce an old-film look. Old color film tends to (or at least used to before modern technology improvements) fade out into a sort of magentish color, OldFilm.cube

One of the things that took me a long time to figure out (which is quite embarrassing given that I am a psychologist, so it should have been obvious) was how they do it in the movies when they reduce all colors to just two (usually referred to as maroon and teal), when our vision is based on three colors, red, green and blue. The effect keeps the red and the green, I thought, but what happens to the blue??? Like this, When I finally figured it out, it was such a duh moment! There is no green in the image! It is a simple matrix calculation: 1 0 0 0 0.2627 0.678 0.0593 0 0.2627 0.678 0.0593 0 The three lines represent the three channels (r, g, b) and the four columns in each line show the what you multiply red, green, blue, and alpha with and then add it up. So, the first line means red stays red (1*red + 0*green + 0*blue + 0*alpha), and the other two are converted to gray. It is our brains that delude us into thinking there is green because all they see is red and not red, so they tell us the not red is the opposite of red, which technically is cyan but somehow in this illusion we perceive it as teal. So darn obvious! I decided to call the effect dichromatic and am including the LUT version of the above matrix. And I then took it a step further. What if we kept two of the three color channels (any two) and change the third one to gray. Or even rotated the hue in the two non-gray channels, we could get an infinite number of possible results. Like in this example, Again, all it takes is a simple matrix. In this case it looks like this: 0.2627 0.678 0.0593 0 -0.1220276122 0.9079384044 0.2140892078 0 -0.6941229391 0.6279308965 1.066192043 0 So, the red channel is turned gray in this example, and the other two are rotated, each by a different angle. I call this method anachromatic. dichromatic.cube anachromatic.cube

Oh, you take all the time you need, my friend. Your health is more important.

And just for comparison, here is the same image with Vzduch.cube, which is essentially the opposite (or perhaps the complement) of Tehla.cube: Both work on the principle of strengthening certain colors, while leaving the rest of the colors untouched. Tehla strengthens the colors in the neighborhood of orange, which Vzduch (meaning Air in Slovak) strengthens the colors in the neighborhood of azure. Vzduch.cube

Hmmm, no downloads in seven hours. Fine, here is a stock image: And here is the same image with Tehla.cube applied:

I understand that Affinity Photo can use LUTs. While I do not have Affinity Photo (I would have gotten it recently had I not been too busy working on my fonts to notice it was 50% off, but I missed that and now have to wait for the next time they discount it like that), I do use LUTs in my video work. Indeed, not only do I use them, I actively create them. And I go against the grain by making them small. For some reason many people seem to believe that the larger a LUT the better. That may be true occasionally, but there are myriads of color filters that can be fit into the smallest LUT possible (which is eight data lines in case of 3D LUTs), and making them bigger is actually a bad idea. I actually created an OFX plug-in (they are used in video editing) for color grading which makes sure all it does can be fit into such a small LUT. The original plug-in is kind of small (I have learned a lot since creating it), and in 2019 I wrote a library of routines (seen here, though with no documentation yet), to rewrite my plug-in with. But then I got very sick (no, not with Covid), spent most of 2020 in medical care, after which I started working on my fonts, so my OFX plug-in has to wait. But I still use the original plug-in, have created a wide variety of LUTs, all small of course. Just this morning, I have been playing with it, and came up with an interesting (or so I think) LUT I named tehla (which means brick in Slovak) because it sort of strengthens brick like colors in an image, making it warmer, especially in photos and videos of human faces. So I thought I’d share the .cube version of it with anyone here who might want to play with it in their Affinity Photo (I hope .cube is the right format for it). I have never uploaded any LUT here, so I hope I have done it correctly for you to get it from here. If not, I will just copy and paste it in the next message. After all, it is a very small LUT. Tehla.cube

Yes, and not just on cans. In the US the warnings on cigarette packs are almost invisible. For example, Pall Mall reds (the brand I used to smoke before quitting some six years ago) had the warning in small gold-color letters on a red background. I was quite surprised when I was visiting my home country (Slovakia) and saw the warnings in bold black letters on a big white background.

In the US you would also have to include a list of ingredients in the order of decreasing volume (or decreasing some quantity, I am not sure it is necessarily the volume). It is supposed to be a complete list, though sometimes they list something vague, such as “spices” (which makes it hard to determine whether it is vegetarian, let alone vegan). You would also have to specify the number of servings in the can, which can be used to fool the mathematically less than sharp consumers into thinking there is less fat/salt/carbs/calories/etc in the can than there actually is because those customers just assume the whole can is 1 serving, despite it stating somewhere on the label that it is 2½ (or some non-integer value) servings in the can. Because apparently dividing by 2½ is something a lot of people cannot figure out. 🤣

What’s a stude and why does a studebaker bake it?

Not likely, but it is possible if, and only if, one downloads the three .otf files rather than the latest release. GitHub is a site for sharing code, which can be changing at any moment. Most people just click on the word Code seen in white letters on the green background, which will give them several options, including to download a .zip file, which it will create on the spot: An even better way is to download the latest release (see where it says Releases in the right pane in the picture above). You click on the word Latest and choose either a .zip file or .tar.gz file (used mostly by Unix geeks). Those two files were created already, so there is no danger of any mismatch. But they contain not just the .otf files, but the .ufo and the rest of the code. Of course, it is compressed and you do not have to decompress anything other than the .otf font files.

So then, the scientific term would be synstromatic. 😜 After all, the Greek word for a layer is στρῶμα. Seriously, the reason I am looking for a right word is that I keep updating the kerning (I just updated it again because somehow I missed the A followed by the O, so I had to fix that). And I do all I can to keep all three fonts on the download page synstromatic (synchronized, syntopic, whatever the right word is), i.e., identically kerned at all times even though it takes several minutes to upload all three fonts from my computer to GitHub.

Thanks.

Something that has been bothering me is that on the download page I described the three fonts as synchronized. That, from the Greek syn- (together) and chronos, means they exist at the same time. Which, of course, they do, but many unrelated fonts can exist at the same time. So, I thought, maybe I should have said syntopized, i.e., made to be at the same place. I searched the web for the word syntopized, but the suggestion came for the word syntopic. Apparently, that word is used in biology for any species that live at the same place simultaneously. Which the Open Air fonts were designed for. So, henceforth, I should refer to these fonts (and other such fonts, for example William’s work) as syntopic. Comments anyone?

This one is supposed to mean wow: 😮

We don’t have a Tesco where I live, so I use zazzle.com for that kind of products.