Installing and applying .cube LUTs in Resolve, Premiere and Final Cut

The pages at /luts/davinci-resolve, /luts/premiere-pro and /luts/final-cut-pro carry the short version of the steps. This is the longer one: what the file is, where it goes, and which of the two LUT slots each application offers is the right one.

What you actually downloaded

A .cube is a plain text file, and the line that decides everything is LUT_3D_SIZE. Around it sit header lines a reader can ignore and a parser skips — a TITLE, and a DOMAIN_MIN/DOMAIN_MAX pair — and below them, that number cubed rows of three decimals. That is the lattice: one output colour per sampled input colour, with the application interpolating everything in between. A LUT is therefore a fixed mapping, not a set of adjustable parameters.

Everything in this catalogue today is .cube, so whatever you pull down here loads anywhere that reads the format — Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut, After Effects. The exception is Lightroom, which reads .xmp camera profiles and cannot load a .cube at all; converting one is a short, one-time job in Photoshop's Camera Raw, and /luts/lightroom walks through it. The Lightroom presets on this site are a different product again — .xmp develop presets, a parameter list with no 3D lattice, and not what this guide is about.

A single LUT downloads as festivalluts.com - <title>.cube. A pack downloads as festivalluts.com - <title>.zip, and the archive and the folder inside it share one name, so unpacking leaves you a single labelled folder rather than loose .cube files scattered into wherever the download landed. Member files keep the names their creator gave them; only the folder around them is branded.

DaVinci Resolve

Resolve is node-based, so a LUT is not just a file you load — it is a node in a chain, and where you put it in that chain decides whether it works.

Open Project Settings (the gear, bottom right, or Shift+9) and go to Color Management. Scroll to Lookup Tables and click Open LUT Folder. Drop the .cube in — a named subfolder is fine and keeps the browser tidy. Back in Resolve, click Update Lists. The LUT then appears in the LUT browser on the Color page and in the right-click menu on any node.

The node order that works is three serial nodes. Node 1 is primary exposure and white balance, on the native log image. Node 2 is the Color Space Transform, or one of the conversion LUTs — it is doing the same job. Node 3 is the creative look, which expects Rec.709.

Correct before you convert, because the Offset wheel only behaves like a real exposure adjustment on log data, and once the transform has squeezed your highlights into Rec.709's much smaller range, pulling exposure down afterwards drags that compressed block down as a whole: you get muddy greys, not recovered detail. The fuller professional version of the same idea is the sandwich: convert into DaVinci Wide Gamut / Intermediate, grade there, convert out to Rec.709, then apply the look.

Premiere Pro

There is no install step. Lumetri reads the file straight off disk, so keep your .cube somewhere you will not move it. Select the clip and open Lumetri Color. For a conversion: Basic Correction → Input LUT → Browse. For a look: Creative → Look → Browse.

The structural fact about Premiere is not a path, though. Lumetri applies the Input LUT before the Basic Correction sliders, so in Premiere the conversion always lands ahead of your exposure and white balance, whether you want it there or not. That is the opposite of the Resolve order above, and it is by design rather than a setting you can change.

If you want the log-first correction anyway, stack two Lumetri instances on the clip: correct in the first, put the conversion in the second's Input LUT, and the creative look in its Creative panel. For most concert footage the single-instance order is fine. It matters most when you are recovering a badly exposed shot — which is exactly when the highlights you need are the ones the conversion has already compressed.

Final Cut Pro

Final Cut also splits the job in two, and the two halves live in completely different places.

For a conversion: select the clip, then Inspector → Info → Settings, scroll to Camera LUT and choose Add Custom Camera LUT, pointing it at the .cube. Then set Output Color Space to whatever the LUT converts to — usually named in the LUT itself. The Camera LUT is the technical slot, applied at the clip level before anything else.

For a creative look: apply the Custom LUT effect from the Effects browser and choose the file in the Inspector. That is the creative slot, and it is applied and reordered like any other effect.

The two slots, and why the choice matters

Each of the three editors above splits the job the same way, because the two kinds of LUT are doing different work. A conversion LUT is technical: it takes footage in one specific log format and puts it into Rec.709 correctly. A creative LUT is a look — contrast, colour, mood — and it expects footage that is already in Rec.709. They are not interchangeable, and the order matters: correct your exposure, convert, then apply the look.

Applying a creative LUT straight to log footage is the single most common reason a LUT does not work. S-Log3 is a recording format, not a viewing one — deliberately flat and desaturated so it can hold the dynamic range — and a Rec.709 look dropped onto it gives you a washed, milky image.

Photoshop having no technical slot is the same point from the other end. The log to Rec.709 conversions expect log video. An ordinary JPEG, or a raw file your editor has already processed, is in a display space, so a conversion LUT applied to it undoes a curve that was never there. On stills, use the creative looks.

Strength controls, and what they are doing

A LUT is a fixed mapping. It has no strength parameter of its own, so nothing can make the transform itself gentler — the only honest way to soften a fixed mapping is to blend its output back toward the image that went into it. That is what the strength control does in Resolve, Final Cut, Photoshop and Lightroom: one operation, differently named.

Lightroom's Amount is the direct equivalent of layer opacity in Photoshop or Mix in Final Cut.

Where a refresh is part of the install

This site publishes install routes for five applications, and three of them end in a refresh step that is part of the procedure rather than a suggestion.

Resolve gives you a button: Update Lists, as above. Photoshop does not — LUTs dropped into its Presets → 3DLUTs folder appear in the Color Lookup dropdown directly, with no loading step each time, but only after a restart. Lightroom Classic reads profiles from the Camera Raw settings folder on launch, so a newly converted profile needs a relaunch too; Lightroom on the cloud imports from that same folder through Edit → Profile browser → the grid icon → triple-dot menu → Import Profiles.

17, 33, 65: what the lattice number means

The creative looks here are 17×17×17; the technical conversions are generated at 33×33×33. To check what you have, open the file and read the LUT_3D_SIZE line.

Uploads to this site are accepted between 8 and 65 points per side. Below 8 is too coarse to hold a look — a 2×2×2 lattice is eight corners with interpolation between them, which cannot express a grade. Above 65 is a mistake rather than a LUT. 65 itself is a standard high-resolution export, not an outlier: Resolve's Export LUT offers 33 and 65, and Lattice and Photoshop both write 64 or 65. At that size you are storing 274,625 points, roughly 7MB of text.

Odd and even sizes are not equivalent: 17, 33 and 65 put a sample exactly on the mid-point of the cube, and 16 and 64 do not.

The one place the 17-point looks here have a real limitation: 17 points can band on smooth gradients in 10-bit delivery, and a night sky or a haze-filled stage wash is exactly that kind of gradient.

Double conversion

Almost always, a LUT looking wrong is a mismatch between what it expects and what it was given. Three causes, in order of frequency: a Rec.709 creative LUT applied to log footage; a conversion LUT for the wrong log format; or a double conversion — a Color Space Transform and a conversion LUT on the same clip. The third is the sneaky one, because each step is individually correct.

Pick the conversion by the log format you recorded, not the camera's marketing name. Six ship here: Sony S-Log3, Canon C-Log3, Apple Log, RED Log3G10, Panasonic V-Log and ARRI LogC3. Blackmagic Film Gen5 and DJI D-Log are deliberately absent until they have been cross-checked against a Resolve CST. The six are baked from a library of eight camera transforms, and all eight land 18% grey on the same Rec.709 value, 0.373 — different curves converging on one display value is the cross-check that matters.

One trap is specific to this catalogue, and it runs the other way. Two of the looks here convert from log themselves rather than expecting Rec.709 input: the Sony S-Log3 and Canon C-Log3 ones do their own decode. Putting a Color Space Transform in front of those double-converts them. The rule holds in both directions — one conversion per clip, and anything in the conversion category is the conversion, whatever camera label it carries.

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Sources

This guide draws only on material this site already publishes or ships:

• The site's own per-application install pages for Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut, Photoshop and Lightroom — the menu paths, the two-slot split, the strength controls and the Resolve node order.
• The homepage FAQ — conversion versus creative LUTs, the three reasons a LUT looks wrong, the six conversions that ship, and what Rec.709 is.
• The upload validator every .cube uploaded here passes through — LUT_3D_SIZE parsing, the 8-to-65 range and the reasons for both ends, export sizes and odd lattices.
• The download code — how single files and packs are named and packaged.
• The site's own build notes — the 17³ looks and 33³ conversions, and the banding limit of 17 points in 10-bit delivery.
• The colour transform library this site ships and tests in the browser — eight camera curves, and the 0.373 convergence at 18% grey.