Simple Tips - Rendering Photoshop LUTS

This Article will be the first in a series of small tips that I have learnt during my career.

Raw renders straight from any package will never get you 100% of the way there. These days its hard to have raw renders represent the final product. Once upton a time I had the feeling that doing any sort of comp work on your renders was heresy if it wasnt in the final render it didnt count I always thought. This thinking is utter nonsense it slows you down. Presentation is everything and time saving a must.

So dont be afraid to try this out for youself. If the process doesnt work exactly as you want, it will give you ideas for your final presentation.

We are going to start with photoshop. The process is simple. In this example I opened a render from this project:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lxYN2G

What we are going to do is use a colour look up table to jump through possible lighting and colour examples. In order to do this were are going to add a colour lookup to our layer stack. Click on the half circle button at the base of your Layer Stack. Once you have clicked this you will see colour Lookup click that. A layer will appear this is handy as its completely non destructive.

After you have completed the above you will be given a properties bar. It should look like this:

This is where you can add and change the 3D LUT. Photoshop by default has a few and they are quite good but I highly recommend looking online for packs of free LUTs. You can even make your own presets ( Thats for another tutoiral another day.) When you click the Load 3D Lut drop down you will get something like this:

Once you have this dropdown open lets start adding some LUTS to our renders! I normally like to click the first one and use my arrow keys to cycle up and down the list. Now you will see that the LUTs are effecting the render. see some results below.

When cycling through these you will notice visual changes to your model. Some of these you will notice as the following: Colour Shift, High Contrast Lighting, Sharper Details, Bloom and a few other things. You will notice your eye will gravitate towards certain profiles more so than others. This helps you find taste or to put it simply what you like. Use LUTS as a tool to help you find render styles that you like and more importantly experiment with. This is fast and efficient way to get results. You can always play around ith the results. Id suggest playing around with the opacity of the layers and see what you like.

Play around with the results see what you get. Add colour filters to edit the colour profile you are going for. If you want Warm, Cold or netural lighting you can use photo filters to achieve this. You can find them here:

Ive combined the render with the 60% Opacity with a photofilter set to underwater the results here:

Using photoshop LUT and Filters are a powerful and fast way to iterate on the final lookdev of the render process. Dont be afraid to use this to your advantage.

Final tip! You can duplicate the render and create a highpass filter of it. Click the filters tab at the top and goto other. Select High Pass filter.

Once you have clicked High Pass the following options will appear select a smaller value so the image looks like this:

Once you have the image looking like a curvature map you can play around with layer blending modes. I recommend Hardlight. You can find the drop down here:

Once you have selected Hard Light you will see a sublte increase in the sharpness of the Edge details. Comparison below:

Thats it from me hopefully you find these tips helpful. Comment and share if you have used these workflows before or even share some of your own work using them! Ill be posting more tutorials on a regular basis. Thanks all!