The more I do color-grading, the more I find working with LUTs a major benefit to the editing process. These help save color grades and quickly apply them to new projects.
There are some great places to download LUTs that professionals have made. However, being a creative, I have created a few myself that fits certain moods and ideas. Learning to create your own can help you save the color scheme you use often, saving time on similar content down the road. You can also package the created LUTs up, and sell them if they are really good. Today, we talk about how easy it is to create a LUT in Premiere Pro.
How to Create a LUT in Adobe Premiere Pro CC
We want to start this project off with some good high quality footage. Grab one of your favorite clips to work on this project! I prefer to use a really good nature shot.
- Create a sequence and drag your footage on to the sequence.
- Go to effects and drag on the Lumetri Color Effect on to your video. (You can also switch to the color workspace from the top)
- Now go through Lumetri and add in all of the effects that you want. Get the footage how you like it.
- Open up the Lumetri Panel. (If you are just using the effect. Go up to Window->Lumetri Color to open the panel)
- Go up to the top near the title of the panel. There will be a “hamburger icon”. Click on this.
- Go down to “Export .cube” button.
- Choose somewhere to save the file.
- This is now a LUT. You can import it in to any program which accepts .cube files. (Which should be most color correction software).
There you have it. It’s really that easy to create a LUT all your own! I like to save these LUTs in an organized folder on my desktop. I like to use moods for storing these. Things like “sad”, “happy”, “energetic”, etc can help organize this folder. This helps make it easier in the future to find your perfect LUT for that new project.
Other neat tricks through Premiere Pro: