3 LUT Generators, Compared Honestly

You have graded one clip and it looks right. Now there are ninety more from the same shoot, and matching them by eye means ninety slightly different results.

A LUT is the answer: a lookup table mapping every input colour to an output colour, saved as a .cube file that DaVinci Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut, Lightroom and most other tools will apply identically. The generators split into two philosophies — build the grade from sliders, or extract it from an image you have already graded — and which you want depends entirely on where the look currently lives.

How to judge a LUT generator

Sliders or extraction? Building from lift, gamma and gain gives precise control. Extracting from a reference image captures a look you have already achieved but cannot describe.

Does it follow the .cube spec properly? LUT size and domain matter. A non-standard file works in one application and fails in another.

Is your footage uploaded? Reference frames from unreleased work are exactly the files not to hand over casually.

What resolution is the LUT? 17×17×17 is common and adequate; 33×33×33 is finer and larger. Neither is wrong, but banding shows up at low resolutions on smooth gradients.

The comparison

Facts checked August 2026; tools change their plans. Table covers only the 3 alternatives — our tool gets its own section below.

SammaPix Color Match

The most direct route from a look you like to a file you can reuse. It samples 3,000 colours from a reference image to build a 17×17×17 3D LUT — each grid point being the weighted average of the 24 nearest reference colours, with 3D box blur smoothing — then applies it to batches of up to 50 images. You can also load existing .cube files from other software.

The output follows the standard Adobe .cube spec at LUT_3D_SIZE 17 with a 0-1 domain, and works in Lightroom, Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, FFmpeg and OBS. 100% free with no signup, no watermark and no upload. A 17-point grid is standard and can show banding on very smooth gradients.

FilmTexture LUT Creator

The bridge from photo editing to video. The workflow is the classic Hald CLUT round trip: download an identity CLUT image, apply your colour grade to it in Lightroom or Photoshop, export as PNG, and upload it back to get a .cube file for professional video software.

That indirection is the price of precision — whatever your photo editor can do to an image, this captures faithfully, including adjustments no slider-based generator exposes. Everything runs in your browser with no files uploaded to any server, free with no login. If you have never met a Hald CLUT it takes one read-through to understand.

Luttie

The most conventional grading interface. It offers RGB curves, colour wheels, HSL controls, AI grading and film effects, with .cube LUT export — which is closer to what a colourist expects than either sliders or image extraction, and the only one here offering curves.

Curves are genuinely the right control for some corrections, particularly contrast shaping that lift-gamma-gain cannot express cleanly. The page presents a free offering with additional capabilities alongside it, and the exact boundary between them is not clearly stated, so check before depending on a specific feature.

LUT Generator

Ours creates a lookup table from lift, gamma, gain, saturation and temperature adjustments, exported as a .cube file. Lift, gamma and gain is the standard three-way colour correction model — shadows, midtones and highlights adjusted independently — which is the vocabulary colour grading actually uses, rather than the exposure-and-contrast sliders a photo editor offers.

What it does not do: extract a grade from a reference image, offer curves, or batch-apply the result to a folder of photos. If the look already exists in a graded frame, SammaPix’s extraction is the correct approach and building it back from sliders is guesswork. A 3D lookup table is worth understanding if you are choosing between grid sizes — it explains directly why 17 points can band where 33 does not.

Which one to pick

• A look that exists in a graded image — SammaPix’s extraction.
• A grade built in Lightroom or Photoshop — FilmTexture’s Hald CLUT route.
• Curves and colour wheels — Luttie.
• Building a grade from lift, gamma and gain — the tool below.

How to do it with LUT Generator

1. Open the LUT Generator and start with lift, gamma and gain — shadows, midtones, highlights.
2. Set temperature before saturation; correcting white balance changes how saturated everything looks.
3. Export the .cube file and apply it to a test clip, not to the frame you built it on.
4. Check skin tones and a smooth gradient like sky. Those are where a LUT falls apart first.

The walkthrough is in how to build a colour grading LUT. Other design tools are in the tools directory.

You might also need

The Image Color Picker helps sample reference colours from a frame you are trying to match.

To match one photo’s colour to another without building a LUT at all, the Photo Color Matcher does that directly.

Frequently asked questions

What is a .cube file?

A plain-text 3D lookup table mapping input colours to output colours. It is the closest thing to a universal format for colour grades — DaVinci Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut, Lightroom, FFmpeg and OBS all read it.

Should I use a 17 or 33 point LUT?

17 is the common default and fine for most grades. 33 gives finer interpolation and is worth it for smooth gradients — skies especially — where a coarse grid can produce visible banding. The file is larger and, for typical footage, indistinguishable.

Can a LUT fix white balance?

Partly. A LUT applies a fixed mapping, so it can shift colour consistently across a shot, but it cannot adapt to footage that was differently balanced to begin with. Correct exposure and white balance first, then apply the look on top.

Final thought

Grade one representative clip, extract or build the LUT from it, then check it on your worst clip rather than your best. A look that survives the difficult footage will survive everything else.

Try the free LUT Generator