Making LUTs with Chris from Airwindows
Here’s something a bit different!
LUTs are LookUp Tables for camera adjusting, video making… all sorts of things. And you can use them in the video streaming software I use, OBS (and in many other places!)
I’d been seeing a wild video effect in the Buchla videos of Kevin Rix, and was trying to track down how he did it. Outboard video synthesizers? And then it hit me… LUTs! I figured he was making really wild, aggressive LUTs and applying them to just whatever video footage he had. And I began to experiment…
Here’s the first official result. Airwindows Psych LUTs. This is a set of LUTs that will give you very plausible ‘psychedelic’ effects, like they were a set of lens filters you can apply. There’s a whole series, from 2 to 64: they’re based on ‘posterize’ effects, so higher numbers mean more subtlety and lower numbers are more aggressive. These bridge the gap between wild color effects and high quality video.
The video walks you through how I made the set, and produces a series of different wild effects LIVE ON CAMERA, often of visual stunts on the reference image that I then apply live to the video as it’s being made. Fun is had by all! And depending on how well you get along with free image editors (and what options they’ve got for editing), you can do every bit of it with FREE software. And you can have the Airwindows PsychLUTs free as well, saving you the trouble of coming up with your own (which you should also do).
All this is supported by Patreon, and though you should take care of yourself first, giving me money clearly only encourages me :D so, you’re going to see more creative tools of ALL sorts being shared and given away here. I get to give you all the tools I can think up, because I don’t have to take money for the tools. People chip in to keep me cranking away on all this stuff full-time, and some bits are a lot of fun. Learning the ways of LUTs is great fun, especially if you mean to make music videos… here’s stuff you can use even if you don’t have a budget. I’ll make more :)
Hey Chris,
enjoyed this…unfortunately G’MIC has stopped supporting Mac so I couldn’t experiment with this idea.
I was just wondering if it would be possible to exclude colours from the processing?
For instance if you could keep your shirt white whilst everything else went tripped out?
All the best,
You shouldn’t need G’MIC. Something like GraphicConverter will give you many options, or ANY way of selecting and altering colors within color ranges or doing overlays.
You can isolate color ranges, or make only certain shades go tripped out. Select only greens, for instance, and make that all freaky with color remappings, but only the greens. Then you have a color range that’s going to blow up with FX, and everything else stays the same. Or, only whites and light greys remain the same, then the shirt stays the same. But ALL other white things will also stay the same. Think chromakey to the Nth degree :)