How to Create and Use LUTs: A Complete Guide for Colorists

Look-Up Tables (LUTs) have become essential tools in modern color grading, offering powerful ways to apply consistent color transformations across footage, emulate film stocks, and streamline post-production workflows. Despite their ubiquity, many colorists use LUTs without fully understanding how they work, when to apply them, or how to create custom LUTs that serve their specific needs. LUTs are mathematical mappings that transform input color values to output values, essentially serving as translators that can convert one color space to another, apply creative looks, or both. Understanding the technical foundations and practical applications of LUTs elevates them from mysterious black boxes to intentional creative tools.

LUTs come in two fundamental types: technical LUTs and creative LUTs, each serving distinct purposes in the color pipeline. Technical LUTs handle color space conversions and log-to-linear transformations, ensuring that footage displays correctly and maintains proper relationships between tonal values. For instance, when working with log-encoded camera footage, a technical LUT converts the flat, desaturated log image into a viewable rec709 or other display space. These technical transformations are mathematically precise and essential for accurate viewing. Creative LUTs, by contrast, apply aesthetic color grades—the teal-and-orange Hollywood look, vintage film emulations, or custom color treatments. While creative LUTs are popular for quickly achieving stylized looks, they work best when applied to properly color-managed footage and should be viewed as starting points rather than complete solutions.

Creating custom LUTs allows colorists to save and reuse successful color grades, ensure consistency across projects, and share looks with collaborators or clients. The process begins with color grading a well-exposed, properly balanced reference image or frame that represents typical footage from your project. Apply your desired color corrections and creative adjustments using your grading software’s tools, building the look methodically from primaries through secondaries to final polish. Most professional grading applications include LUT export functions that generate cube files (the most common LUT format) from your current grade. The key consideration is that LUTs are fixed mappings—they cannot adapt to different exposure levels or lighting conditions, so they work best when applied to consistently shot footage.