Apply a LUT to a Photo

A LUT (look-up table) is a colour grade stored as a table rather than as a list of settings. Instead of recalculating contrast, saturation and colour balance for every pixel, the table already says which output colour each input colour becomes, so applying it is a lookup. That is why one file grades identically in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Photoshop and on this page.

Almost always because it was built for a different kind of input. LUTs come in two sorts: technical ones that convert flat camera Log footage (S-Log3, V-Log, Apple Log) into normal colour, and creative ones that lay a look over an ordinary photo. A Log conversion applied to a normal photograph blows out the contrast and saturation; a creative look applied to Log footage comes out washed out. Nothing inside a .cube file says which it expects, so the filename or the seller's description is the only clue. The other cause is simply strength - a look built against one reference photo is usually too strong on yours, which is what the slider is for.

No. Both are read straight from your device, and every lookup happens on a canvas inside this browser tab. Nothing is sent to YouArt or to any third party, which also means there is no stored copy for anyone to access later. If you turn off your network after the page loads, the tool still works.

Both. A 1D LUT is three separate curves, one per channel, so it can change brightness, contrast and gamma but not saturation or a hue shift, because those depend on all three channels at once. A 3D LUT is a cube of colours and can do all of it. This page reads both, and converts a 1D file onto a 65-point cube so it grades the same way either path.

No, and the reason is worth knowing because it applies to every LUT everywhere. A look-up table answers one question per pixel: given this colour, what colour should it become. It never learns where the pixel is, so it cannot add anything that depends on position - grain, halation, bloom, vignetting, dust, scratches or light leaks. A film emulation LUT gives you the colour half of a film look and nothing else. If you want grain as well, add it afterwards in an editor that does spatial effects.

Yes, at any percentage. The slider mixes the graded result back toward your original picture and the preview follows as you drag. A .cube you download afterwards carries that strength baked into the table, so it lands the same way in your editor as it looked here.

The arithmetic is the same - a 3D LUT applied with trilinear interpolation - so a .cube grades the same way here as it does there. The difference is what you have to have open. This runs in a browser tab with nothing installed, nothing uploaded and no subscription, and it draws every look on your own photograph before you choose one, which a plugin's list of names cannot. Photoshop and Lightroom win where you need the rest of an editor: masks, local adjustments, curves, raw files, or a whole folder at once. This page grades one photo and hands it back. It also exports the look as a .cube, so anything you set here can be taken into Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut or Photoshop - including onto footage, which this page does not touch.

Yes. Any look active on this page can be saved as a .cube and used in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Photoshop or anything else that reads LUTs. The ten built-in looks are ours - written as arithmetic rather than borrowed from a pack - so they are free to use and free to keep.

Yes. Mono Contrast converts the picture to greyscale using the standard Rec.709 luma weights and then adds contrast, and Sepia does the same conversion with a warm tint over it. Because it is a LUT, the strength slider works on it too, so you can stop halfway and keep a trace of the original colour. What you do not get is a black-and-white workshop: there is no channel mixer and no simulated red or yellow lens filter, so you cannot darken a blue sky independently of the rest of the frame. It is one conversion, done well, with a dial.

The ten built into this page are a start, and any .cube file works: packs you have bought, free packs you have downloaded, or a LUT you exported from your own grade in Resolve or Lightroom. This page does not host anyone else's pack.

Download the base grid from the panel above. It is a 512 x 512 PNG holding all 262,144 colours of a 64-point cube, one per pixel, so grading it records what your grade does to every colour there is. Open it in any editor, grade it however you like, and save it as a PNG - the graded grid IS a LUT, and RawTherapee, G'MIC and ImageMagick read that file directly. Two rules matter. Save as PNG and never JPG, because every pixel is a table entry and lossy compression corrupts the table itself. And use colour adjustments only: curves, white balance, saturation, a look you already own. Grain, blur, vignetting and sharpening destroy the grid rather than being recorded in it, because neighbouring pixels here are unrelated colours rather than neighbouring parts of a picture. This page itself reads .cube files, so take the graded grid to an app that accepts Hald PNGs, or convert it to .cube and load that here.

Yes, with no account, no credits and no watermark. It costs us nothing to run because your own browser does the work, so there is no usage limit to enforce. The paid part of YouArt is the AI image and video tools, which are a separate thing entirely.