LUT previewer: try a LUT on your own frame

What this tool does

The LUT previewer puts a colour look on a frame of your own footage, in your browser, so you can judge it before you download or buy anything. You pick what you shot on, drop in a still or a video file, and every look appears as a thumbnail made from your frame. Pick one and drag the handle across the picture to compare it with the original.

You need it at two moments. First, when you are choosing a look: a sample image on a sales page shows someone else's light, and your footage will not react the same way. Second, when a LUT you already have looks wrong and you want to know whether the look is bad or whether you grabbed the version for the wrong kind of footage. The comparison panel under the looks answers that second question directly.

Everything runs on your computer. Your image, your video and your .cube files are read locally and are never sent anywhere.

How to use it

1. Say what you shot on. Choose Standard / Flat for phones, drones and any camera not set to log, or your log format. You get the version of each look built for that footage.
2. Load a frame. Choose a JPG or PNG, paste a screenshot, or choose a video file and drag the frame picker to the moment you want. You get your frame on the stage and a line that says whether it looks like log or standard footage.
3. Pick a look. Each tile in the strip is your own frame through that look. Click one and you get the big before and after view.
4. Check the version. The panel under the strip shows the same look through a version built for a different kind of footage. If the other tile looks more like a finished picture, click it. Open all seven when you are unsure what your camera recorded.
5. Set the intensity. Drag it down from 100% if the look is stronger than the video wants. You get the same blend an editor's opacity or intensity control gives.
6. Test your own LUT. Drop a .cube file onto the tool. It is parsed on your computer and added to the strip next to the built-in looks.
7. Save or go get the files. Download the preview as a JPG to compare later or send to a client, then follow the link to the look's page for the full-quality .cube.

The looks you can preview

Each look below has its own page with the story behind it, a before and after, and the download. If you have never used one, read color grading with a LUT in our free course first.

• Sora: The house signature: turquoise-leaning skies that keep their gradient, warm red mids under cold whites, skin that stays skin.
• Retro Surf: 70s-postcard: a cool turquoise world with warmth laid only on people and whites, pink clouds over a cyan sky.
• Horror Green: A corridor drowned in sick emerald, with the practical lights still glowing white. Your exposure untouched.
• Horror Blue: The same dread in steel: a corridor flooded with deep blue, the lamp still burning white.
• Vinland: The 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.
• Panelka: The 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.
• Ronin: Black 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 Blue: Luminous blue-green daylight: the colour lives in the shade and the whites stay pure, which is what makes it read bright rather than filtered.
• Bold Cinema: Teal-orange with deep blacks: the world goes teal and dense while skin stays bright and natural, not orange plastic.
• Matcha: A lush jade-and-lime world: greens that deepen in the shade and glow in the sun, green-black shadows, a matte pale-mint top, skin kept human.

The facts this tool is built on

Fact	Source
A 3D .cube file stores N x N x N output colours, where N (LUT_3D_SIZE) is a whole number from 2 to 256.	Adobe Cube LUT Specification 1.0, section 7.1, checked October 2026
In a 3D .cube file the rows are ordered with red changing fastest and blue changing slowest.	Adobe Cube LUT Specification 1.0, section 7.2, checked October 2026
If a .cube file has no DOMAIN_MIN or DOMAIN_MAX line, its input range is 0 to 1 on every channel.	Adobe Cube LUT Specification 1.0, section 5.6, checked October 2026
The .cube specification says a reader should use tetrahedral interpolation for 3D tables and linear interpolation for 1D tables.	Adobe Cube LUT Specification 1.0, section 8, checked October 2026
A 1D .cube file (LUT_1D_SIZE) holds three separate curves of 2 to 65,536 points, one per channel, so it cannot move one colour toward another.	Adobe Cube LUT Specification 1.0, section 6.1, checked October 2026
Log footage stores its blacks lifted, at about 0.09 to 0.21 of full scale on this site's test footage, while flat and standard footage sits near 0.00.	Our own measurement, published on the LUT library page, checked October 2026
Each Vanpelt look is a 65-point .cube with 274,625 colours. The preview copy in this tool has 17 points per side, 4,913 colours.	Counted by this site's build script (scripts/make_lut_previews.mjs), October 2026
Across all 70 look and version pairs, the preview copy differs from the full file by 0.91 levels out of 255 on average. About 1.5% of sampled values differ by more than 8 levels, and the worst single value differs by 119 levels.	Measured by the same script at every point of the full 65-point lattice, October 2026
All 70 preview copies together weigh 295 KB, and a browser loads only the versions you look at.	File sizes in this site's repository, October 2026

The Adobe link above points to a mirror copy of the specification, because Adobe's own download address for the PDF returned an error when we checked it in October 2026. The large differences in the preview copies sit where a look changes abruptly between neighbouring colours, which a coarser grid smooths over. That is one more reason to treat the preview as a guide and grade with the full file.

A worked example

The example frame is a street corner in Sapporo shot in Sony S-Log2. Loaded into the tool, its darkest pixels sit at about 17% of full scale and its average colour spread is about 0.05, so the frame check reads it as log footage.

1. Through Sora, S-Log2 version (the right one), the sky turns turquoise, the signs get their colour back and the colour spread rises to about 0.13. This is the finished picture.
2. Through Sora, Standard / Flat version, the darkest pixels stay at about 17%. The picture keeps its grey veil, because that version expects footage that already has contrast.
3. Through Sora, S-Log3 version, the darkest pixels drop to about 6% and the whole frame goes darker and harder than intended, because S-Log3 stores the same scene with different numbers than S-Log2.

Same look, same frame, three different pictures. Only the first one is the look. That is why the tool asks what you shot on before anything else.

What it does not do

• It does not grade video. It shows one frame at a time, and nothing is exported except a JPG of that frame. The grading itself happens in your editor, as described in color grading with a LUT.
• It does not replace the full files. The built-in looks are 17-point preview copies, and the page does not hand out the 65-point originals. Those are on the LUT library page.
• It does not read your camera settings. The line about log or standard footage is a guess from the picture: a foggy scene can read as log, and a grade with lifted blacks reads as neither.
• It works at 8 bits in the browser's standard colour space. HDR footage, 10-bit precision and wide-gamut monitoring are outside what it can show.
• It does not read 1D LUTs or files that put a 1D shaper in front of a 3D table, and it holds 3D tables up to 129 points per side.
• It cannot add grain, bloom or sharpness. No LUT can, because a LUT only maps one colour to another.
• It does not remember your frame or your own .cube files. Reload the page and they are gone. Your choice of version, look and intensity is kept in your browser.

Choosing the colour is one small decision in a video. The Vanpelt Studio app works on the larger one: whether the footage you shot covers the video you planned.