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Free LUTs · travel · warm · film

Retro Surf

70s-postcard: a cool turquoise world with warmth laid only on people and whites, pink clouds over a cyan sky.

Ungraded log footage: two men with drinks against a graffiti wall, flat gray sky
The same frame through the Retro Surf LUT: turquoise wall, blue sky with pink clouds, warm skin
Drag the handle. Left: the camera's log file. Right: Retro Surf, nothing else applied.

Retro Surf is the grade of "I Filmed My Vietnam Vlog Like A Surf Movie", rebuilt from scratch as a LUT after the video shipped and matched to its look frame by frame. The trick that makes it work is order. The cyans and blues get grabbed first, while the log sky is still bluish, and only then does the warm film cast go on top. That way the warmth lands on the people, the shirts and the clouds, but never touches what has already turned turquoise. Pink clouds over a cyan sky: that is the whole postcard.

One honest note: the film texture in the reference stills is grain, and grain is spatial, so no LUT can carry it. Add a grain node in your editor on top and the look completes. Resolve's Film Grain OFX on a subtle 35mm preset does it.

From the surf-movie vlog: read the case study →

Get Retro Surf, and everything else

Pick the version that matches how you shoot and get every look in one zip, each file already correct for your footage, plus the license and a one-page install guide for Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut and CapCut.

Not sure what you shoot? Find your camera →

The download starts either way. The email is only so you hear when the next look ships: no course emails, no product news.

Also in the pack

  • SoraThe house signature: turquoise-leaning skies that keep their gradient, warm red mids under cold whites, skin that stays skin.
  • Horror GreenA corridor drowned in sick emerald, with the practical lights still glowing white. Your exposure untouched.
  • Horror BlueThe same dread in steel: a corridor flooded with deep blue, the lamp still burning white.
  • VinlandThe elf-world grade: gold in the highlights, a warm floor so nothing is ever black, dirt trails a proper brown, greens vivid and luminous, skies a light pastel blue.
  • PanelkaThe cold one: blacks that actually reach black, a grey-blue floor, deep skies, and colour held on a leash so a shop sign cannot shout over the concrete.
  • RoninBlack and white the way film did it: a red-weighted channel mix, so skies go dark, foliage drops away and skin stays bright and smooth. Not a saturation slider at zero.
  • Calm BlueLuminous blue-green daylight: the colour lives in the shade and the whites stay pure, which is what makes it read bright rather than filtered.