If you love your camera’s ability to make you creative, Panasonic has a new app for Lumix that stretches that in a new way.
Whether you’re someone who loves colour or monochrome, the digital cameras of today can give you a lot of control over what sort of images they take. It’s more than just “snap a picture and be done with it”, but get a retrolicious look if you so choose.
No longer do you need to rely on a specific type of film, or even a darkroom. You can manipulate an image all too easily in phone or on computer, and you might even be able to enact a style directly on the camera itself.
Take the styles settings on the iPhone, which allow you to tweak the colour and look of a photo as you’re capturing, or even flick it back to a more natural sense of the way things were.
Over on a proper camera, you may need to change things up in the settings to get that custom look, though Panasonic has found a different approach with its Lumix cameras.
A new feature has rolled out called “Magic LUT” where owners of a Lumix can grab an app on their phone, take a reference image, and have the app use AI to match colours, tones, and mood of the image to create a custom LUT, or “lookup table”, what’s basically a listing of colours and tone mapping to make images and videos look a little bit different.
The concept essentially applies that look to images and videos shot on Panasonic Lumix cameras, while the app can be used with images and videos from practically anything else. It means you could theoretically take an image from the iPhone, or even a photo from a Leica (or a Leica-tuned phone!) and apply the results to a Lumix, giving you a more specific look and feel.
For owners of older cameras, that might include pictures from yesteryear they’re trying to digitally recreate the look and feel of. While this won’t likely recreate grain, it could revive a style you’ve captured before in something that captures it today.
The feature joins the Lumix Lab app, as well as firmware changes on the way to Panasonic’s cameras.
