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What Is a LUT?
A LUT, or lookup table, is a mathematical recipe that transforms colour. It takes an input colour value and maps it to a different output colour value, applying the same transformation consistently to every pixel in an image or video frame. If you have ever seen flat, grey-looking footage transformed into something cinematic with a single click, a LUT was likely doing the work.
The concept is borrowed from mathematics and computer science, where lookup tables have been used for decades to speed up calculations. Rather than computing a complex function every time, you pre-calculate the results and store them in a table. The same principle applies to colour: rather than manually adjusting every hue, saturation value, and luminance curve each time you grade a shot, you define the transformation once and let the LUT apply it everywhere.
Colour grading would be impractical without LUTs. A feature film might contain thousands of individual shots, each of which needs to share a consistent visual style. A colourist might spend hours perfecting the look of a single reference frame, but applying that same grade across an entire project by hand would take weeks. LUTs make this process manageable. They enable consistent looks across shots, scenes, and entire projects, which is why they sit at the heart of every professional colour pipeline.
Types of LUTs
LUTs come in two fundamental varieties, and understanding the difference matters for choosing the right one.
A 1D LUT is the simpler type. It adjusts each colour channel independently, applying a separate curve to red, green, and blue. Think of it as three individual tonal adjustments running in parallel. A 1D LUT can change brightness, contrast, and the overall tonal response of an image, but it cannot create interactions between colour channels. If you want to shift blues toward teal or push shadows toward a warm orange, a 1D LUT cannot do that on its own. 1D LUTs are fast and lightweight, which makes them useful for technical conversions and simple tonal corrections, but they are limited in creative scope.
A 3D LUT is far more powerful. Instead of treating each channel separately, a 3D LUT maps input RGB values to output RGB values in a three-dimensional colour space. This means it can create complex colour transforms where the output for one channel depends on the values of the other two. A 3D LUT can make blues cooler only in the shadows while keeping highlights warm, or desaturate greens while boosting skin tones. Most creative LUTs used in film and video production are 3D LUTs because they offer the full range of colour manipulation.
Beyond the 1D and 3D distinction, LUTs also fall into two practical categories based on their purpose. Technical LUTs handle colour space conversions. They translate footage from one defined colour space to another, such as converting from a camera's log profile to Rec.709 for standard display. These LUTs are mathematically precise and designed to be invisible; their job is to make footage look correct, not stylised. Creative LUTs, on the other hand, apply a "look" or style to footage. They might emulate the colour palette of a particular film stock, push the image toward a teal-and-orange split, or create a desaturated, high-contrast mood. Creative LUTs are the ones you see sold in packs online and shared between filmmakers. If you work regularly with graded footage and need a reliable way to review colour-critical work with collaborators, accurate colour in your review environment matters as much as the LUT itself.
Common LUT formats
The most universal LUT format is .cube, developed by Adobe and now supported by virtually every colour grading, editing, and compositing application. If you are creating or sharing LUTs, .cube is the safest choice because it works everywhere.
Other formats exist for specific software ecosystems. The .3dl format originated with Autodesk's Lustre and is still used in some high-end finishing tools. The .lut format appears in certain applications, and .mga is associated with Pandora and similar systems. DaVinci Resolve supports its own .drx format for complete grade information, though this carries more than a simple LUT. For most practical purposes, .cube covers everything you need. When you are managing large collections of creative assets including LUT files, keeping them organised and accessible saves time during tight deadlines.
How LUTs relate to log footage
To understand why LUTs are so central to modern video workflows, you need to understand log footage. Most professional and many prosumer cameras offer logarithmic recording profiles: Sony's S-Log, Canon's C-Log, Blackmagic's Film, ARRI's LogC, RED's Log3G10, and others. These profiles capture the maximum dynamic range the sensor can deliver, preserving detail in both highlights and shadows.
The trade-off is that log footage looks flat and desaturated straight out of the camera. Skin tones appear grey, skies look washed out, and nothing has the contrast or saturation your eye expects. This is intentional. The camera is storing as much information as possible, giving the colourist the most latitude to shape the image in post-production.
A technical LUT converts this flat log footage into a viewable colour space, typically Rec.709 for standard displays. This conversion is the starting point for grading, not the end. The technical LUT brings the image to a neutral, correct-looking baseline from which creative decisions can be made. Camera manufacturers provide these technical LUTs for their specific log profiles, and using the correct one matters. Applying a Sony S-Log3 to Rec.709 LUT to footage shot in Canon C-Log2 will produce incorrect colours because the mathematical relationship between log and display values differs between manufacturers. Understanding how codecs and colour science interact helps you make better decisions about your entire pipeline, from capture through delivery.
Applying LUTs in editing software
Every major editing and grading application supports LUTs, though the implementation varies. DaVinci Resolve is the most powerful option for colour work. Its node-based grading system lets you apply LUTs at any point in the signal chain. You can place a technical LUT on one node, your creative adjustments on subsequent nodes, and a creative LUT at the end if you choose. Resolve also distinguishes between timeline-level and clip-level LUT application, giving you fine control over where transformations happen. For anyone working seriously with colour, Resolve's free version offers more grading capability than most paid alternatives.
In Adobe Premiere Pro, LUTs live in the Lumetri Color panel. You can apply an input LUT (for technical conversions) and a creative LUT separately, and Premiere provides a selection of built-in looks. The interface is simpler than Resolve's but covers the needs of most editing workflows. Final Cut Pro offers a custom LUT option in its colour correction tools, letting you import and apply .cube files to clips or adjustment layers. After Effects handles LUTs through the Apply Color LUT effect, which is useful for motion graphics and compositing work where colour consistency with the main edit matters.
Even Photoshop can apply .cube LUT files through its Color Lookup adjustment layer, which is helpful when pulling stills from graded video projects or when a photographer wants to match a video grade. Whichever application you use, the principle is the same: the LUT remaps every colour value in the image according to its internal table.
The colour grading workflow
A practical colour workflow using LUTs typically follows a clear sequence. You shoot in a log profile to capture the widest dynamic range your camera offers. In post, you apply a technical or normalisation LUT first to convert the log footage to a standard colour space for viewing. This step brings the image to a neutral, correctly exposed, correctly saturated baseline.
From this baseline, you make your primary corrections: adjusting exposure, white balance, and contrast to ensure consistency across all shots in a scene. Then you move to secondary corrections, isolating specific elements like skin tones, skies, or practical lights for targeted adjustment. Finally, if you are using a creative LUT, it goes on top of this corrected image as a finishing layer. Many colourists reduce the intensity of creative LUTs to 50 or 70 percent, blending the stylised look with the underlying grade rather than letting the LUT dominate entirely.
This layered approach matters because a creative LUT applied directly to log footage, without the technical conversion first, will produce unpredictable results. The LUT was designed expecting a certain input colour space, and feeding it raw log values means it cannot do its job correctly. When working on video projects with multiple collaborators, sharing reference stills or short graded clips helps everyone agree on the intended look before the full grade begins. Fabric's annotation tools let you leave time-stamped comments directly on footage, which is useful when discussing grade revisions with a colourist.
Limitations and common mistakes
LUTs are powerful tools, but they have real limitations that trip up editors and filmmakers regularly. The most common mistake is treating LUTs as universal fixes. A LUT designed for one camera's log profile applied to a different camera's footage will look wrong because the input colour values do not match what the LUT expects. A LUT built for ARRI LogC assumes a specific tonal curve and colour gamut; applying it to Sony S-Log3 footage means the shadows, midtones, and highlights are all mapped incorrectly.
LUTs also cannot compensate for poor exposure. If footage is significantly underexposed, a LUT will amplify noise and push muddy shadow detail into the midtones. If footage is overexposed with clipped highlights, no LUT can recover information that was never recorded. Proper exposure at the time of shooting remains essential, and no amount of post-production colour work changes that.
Over-reliance on creative LUTs is another pitfall. It is tempting to download a popular LUT pack and apply a preset look to every project, but this approach limits your creative growth and often produces mediocre results. Creative LUTs work best as starting points or finishing touches, not as substitutes for learning the fundamentals of colour grading. Understanding how lift, gamma, gain, hue curves, and secondary qualifiers work gives you far more control than any preset can offer. The editors and colourists who produce the best work treat LUTs as one tool among many, not as the whole toolkit.
Another subtle issue is the precision of 3D LUTs. A 3D LUT with a standard 33-point grid (33x33x33) contains 35,937 entries. For colours that fall between grid points, the software interpolates, and this interpolation can introduce slight inaccuracies in extreme colour transforms. Higher-resolution LUTs (65-point or 128-point grids) reduce this issue but increase file size. For most work, 33-point LUTs are more than adequate, but it is worth knowing why very aggressive creative LUTs sometimes produce banding or unexpected colour shifts.
Creating your own LUTs
Making your own LUTs is one of the most practical skills a colourist or editor can develop. The process is simple in concept: grade a shot to your satisfaction, then export that grade as a .cube file. In DaVinci Resolve, you right-click a node tree and choose "Generate LUT" to save the current grade. Premiere Pro and other tools offer similar export functions.
The resulting .cube file captures the colour transformation you created, which you can then apply to other shots from the same project or camera. This is particularly useful for documentary and multi-camera work where dozens or hundreds of clips need a consistent starting point. Grade one representative clip from each camera or lighting setup, export the LUT, and apply it across matching clips as a baseline before making individual adjustments.
When creating LUTs for distribution or reuse across projects, it helps to build them from a known starting point (like a Rec.709 baseline) rather than from log footage directly. This makes the LUT more predictable when applied by others who may be working from different source material. Storing your LUT library alongside your project files in a well-organised system makes it easy to revisit and refine your looks over time.
Where to find LUTs
Camera manufacturers are the first source for technical LUTs. Sony, Canon, ARRI, RED, Blackmagic, Panasonic, and Fujifilm all provide official LUTs for converting their log profiles to Rec.709 and other display standards. These are typically free downloads from the manufacturer's support pages and should be your starting point for any footage shot in those cameras' log profiles.
For creative LUTs, the market is enormous. Paid LUT packs from respected colourists and colour houses like Filmconvert, Koji, and Lutify.me offer well-crafted looks that have been tested across a range of footage types. Free LUTs are also widely available from filmmaking communities, YouTube creators, and software developers. The quality varies considerably, so testing any creative LUT on your own footage before committing to it in a project is essential.
Some video editors and videographers build personal LUT libraries over the course of their careers, refining signature looks that become part of their visual identity. Whether you buy, download, or create your own, keeping your LUT collection well organised, backed up, and accessible from any device ensures they remain useful rather than lost in a folder somewhere.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a LUT and a colour grade?
A LUT is a single, fixed colour transformation stored as a file. A colour grade is the broader creative process of adjusting colour, contrast, and tone in footage, which may involve dozens of individual adjustments. A colourist might use LUTs as part of their grading process, but the full grade encompasses much more than any single LUT can capture.
Can I use a LUT on footage that was not shot in log?
Yes, but the results will differ from what the LUT creator intended. Creative LUTs are often designed assuming Rec.709 input, in which case they work fine on standard footage. Technical LUTs designed for log-to-Rec.709 conversion should only be used on the specific log format they were built for. Applying a log conversion LUT to standard footage will produce an overly contrasty, saturated image.
Do LUTs work the same across different software?
The underlying colour transformation is identical because it is defined by the .cube file's data. However, slight differences in colour management, working colour spaces, and rendering pipelines between applications can produce subtle variations. A LUT applied in DaVinci Resolve and the same LUT applied in Premiere Pro should look very similar, but pixel-identical results are not guaranteed.
What LUT size should I use?
For 3D LUTs, a 33-point grid (33x33x33) is the standard and works well for the vast majority of applications. Higher-resolution LUTs like 65-point are useful for very precise technical work or extreme colour transforms. For 1D LUTs, 1024 points is common and sufficient. Larger LUTs increase file size without a visible benefit in most workflows.
Can I adjust the intensity of a LUT?
Most editing and grading applications let you reduce the opacity or intensity of an applied LUT. In DaVinci Resolve, you can adjust the key output gain of the node carrying the LUT. In Premiere Pro, the Lumetri panel has an intensity slider for creative LUTs. Dialling a creative LUT back to 60 or 70 percent often produces a more natural result than applying it at full strength.
Should I apply a LUT before or after my other colour corrections?
For technical LUTs that convert log to Rec.709, apply these first so you are grading from a correct baseline. For creative LUTs that add a stylistic look, apply them after your primary and secondary corrections. This gives you a properly balanced image before the creative transformation is layered on top.
Are LUTs only for video?
No. LUTs are used in photography, digital cinema, visual effects, and even printing workflows. Photoshop supports .cube files through its Color Lookup adjustment layer. The principle of mapping input colour values to output values applies to any raster image, whether it is a single photograph or a frame of video.
Can I convert a LUT from one format to another?
Yes. Several free tools and online converters can translate between .cube, .3dl, and other LUT formats. Lattice and LUT Calc are popular options. DaVinci Resolve can also import various formats and export as .cube. Converting between formats preserves the colour data; you are changing the container, not the transformation.
Do I need expensive software to use LUTs?
No. The free version of DaVinci Resolve offers full LUT support, including the ability to create, apply, and manage LUTs. Many free and low-cost editing applications also support .cube files. LUT usage is not locked behind expensive software.
How do I know which LUT matches my camera's log profile?
Camera manufacturers specify which LUT to use with each log profile in their documentation. The LUT file name usually includes the log profile and target colour space (for example, "SLog3_to_Rec709.cube"). Using the wrong technical LUT produces incorrect colours, so matching the LUT to your exact camera and log setting is essential.