Craig Van Horne
SpeedLooks by LookLabs enters into Licensing Agreement with Adobe

My friends over at LookLabs, who make the awesome color grading looks… or LUTs (Lookup Tables); SpeedLooks, have entered into a licensing agreement with Adobe to including several of their looks with Adobe SpeedGrade for free… as part of an Adobe Creative Cloud Subscription. Pretty cool if you ask me, included in the subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud is now a much more elegant and fast way to get really nice skin tones… fast!
Here’s the press release from LookLabs:
09-10-2013 Calgary, Canada — September 10, 2013 — LookLabs™ is pleased to announce a licensing and development agreement with Adobe. As part of this agreement, SpeedLooks, LookLabs’ proprietary color grading preset software, will now be available within SpeedGrade® CC – part of Adobe® Creative Cloud™ – and fully compatible with Adobe Premiere® Pro CC, Photoshop® CC and After Effects® CC, SpeedLooks helps SpeedGrade CC users to produce beautiful results with material shot on a wide range of modern digital cinema cameras. SpeedLooks will be included in Creative Cloud membership at no additional cost.
SpeedLookswas created by the team at LookLabs and is based on years of color science research and development. LookLabs is an industry leader specializing in the creation and marketing of color grading pre-set looks using universal 3D LUTs and digital camera profiles for color finishing of high definition and digital cinema camera footage.
“SpeedGrade helps users craft the perfect look for every production,” says Simon Williams, Director of Strategic Relations at Adobe. “Now, the SpeedLooks color science and camera patch technology provides a simple way to level the playing field so footage from different cameras will behave the same way when SpeedLooks is applied. SpeedLooks gives both new and seasoned users the ability to quickly produce work that looks like it has been professionally color graded.”
“SpeedLooks creates rich and dynamic colors, even skin tones and the subtleties of traditional 35mm film. It has already been used on thousands of commercials, feature films, music videos, and network television programs,” says Jeff August, Colorist at LookLabs. “With users in more than 40 countries world-wide, SpeedLooks has become a cornerstone and an essential ingredient in the digital film making process.”
“Our unique camera patch technology allows users of SpeedLooks to customize their looks specifically for the native camera it was shot on,” says Jerome Sabourin csc Cinematographer and Colorist at LookLabs. “Our Rec. 709 HD patch is highly optimized for many of today’s digital cinema cameras as are our specific patches for Sony, Go-Pro, RED, Canon, Arri, Blackmagic Design and Nikon cameras to name a few.”
“We are extremely pleased to announce our collaboration with Adobe,” says Brian Vos, General Manager of LookLabs. “It’s a natural fit to be a part of the Adobe workflow in the color finishing of digital images.”
http://looklabs.net/index.php?p=blog&id=36
One other thing that makes this really cool, is that the next version of SpeedGrade and Premiere will also feature the ability to open your Premiere edit directly in SpeedGrade, make everything look pretty and then close out and re-open in Premiere with your grade in tact, live. No need to render to an intermediate, or to render back out of SpeedGrade, this is really good round tripping. If you’re interested here is a link to the new features from my friend Patrick Palmer:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-at-ibc-2013/adobe-speedgrade-cc-october-2013-release-overview/
I think that Adobe is proving that the new licensing model is the right way to go, the number of updates, features and refinements across the board in the creative apps is astounding and not even six months after first being released. This is a very interesting time to be a content creator. This kind of rapid development and release to the user base simply could not have happened under the old licensing model.