Harness the power of Color LUTs

Color Lookup Tables are a handy tonal tool – and you can create custom versions, too

olor Lookup Tables have been available in Photoshop for a while, but they’re often overlooked as a tonal tool. This may be because they’re thought of primarily as a means for colour-grading video footage in software like Premiere Pro. But they can also be handy for editing stills, especially in combination with Profiles.

Referred to as LUTs for short, a Color Lookup Table is a means of remapping colours in your image so that, say, a deep red becomes a dull pink instead. Imagine all the colours in an image written as a list or, as the name suggests, a table. Then imagine each colour in the table has a second field that directs it to another colour. This is essentially what a Color Lookup Table does.

Photoshop offers an array of built in LUTs: these one-click effects let you restyle your image in seconds. But where things get interesting is in the ability to create and export your own LUTs. These can then be loaded back into the Color Lookup Adjustment in Photoshop, or built into Profiles to be used in Camera Raw or Lightroom.

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