how to install luts: premiere, resolve & final cut

every editor that reads .cube files has a folder it checks for luts. copy a lut in there once and it shows up in the menu on every project, so you stop browsing to your downloads folder each time you grade.

here is where that folder is in each app, and the fastest way to reach it.

need luts to install? grab free .cube luts or a pro lut pack. they load in every app on this page. want your own look instead? build it in the luttie editor and save it as a .cube (grading is free, lut export needs pro).

premiere pro: the common luts folder

browsing for a lut in lumetri loads it for that one clip. to keep a lut in the dropdown for good, it has to sit in one of adobe's lut folders. adobe's own faq lists them:

just for you (no admin rights needed)

• macos: /Users/<you>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/LUTs/
• windows: C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Common\LUTs\

for every user on the machine

• macos: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/LUTs/
• windows: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Common\LUTs\

inside LUTs you need two folders, and which one you use decides where the lut appears:

• Creative feeds the look dropdown under lumetri color → creative. your stylistic luts go here.
• Technical feeds the input lut dropdown under lumetri color → basic correction. log to rec.709 conversion luts go here.

the steps:

1. quit premiere pro
2. open the LUTs folder for your system. both per-user folders are hidden by default, so paste the path in rather than clicking to it: in finder press cmd + shift + g, and in explorer paste %APPDATA%\Adobe\Common\LUTs into the address bar
3. if LUTs, Creative or Technical isn't there, create it. adobe says these folders often don't exist until you make them
4. copy your .cube files into Creative or Technical
5. open premiere. adobe says it scans these folders at launch, which is why a restart is needed

the luts now sit in the dropdown alongside the built-in ones, on every project.

don't use the folder inside the app

a lot of short videos show a different route: right-click the premiere pro app, show package contents, and drop luts into Lumetri/LUTs. it does make them appear. adobe's own faq is blunt about it ("do not do this"): luts stored inside the application are lost once you update premiere pro to a new version, and can go missing when you share a project or send a sequence to media encoder. the common folders above survive all three.

if they don't show up

• you didn't restart. premiere only reads the folders at launch
• the lut is in the wrong one of the two folders. a lut in Technical will never appear under creative → look
• the folder names are off. they need to be Common/LUTs/Creative and Common/LUTs/Technical

one honest caveat: adobe's faq dates from 2016, and there is a 2025 thread from people who struggled to get this working on premiere pro 2025. the advice in it that held up is the same as above: use the common folder and create the subfolders by hand.

for applying the lut once it's installed, see how to import luts into premiere pro.

davinci resolve: open lut folder

resolve gives you a button that opens the right folder, so you don't need to know the path.

1. open project settings (the gear at the bottom right, or file → project settings)
2. go to color management and find the lookup tables section
3. click open lut folder
4. copy your .cube files in. make a subfolder for them if you like, since resolve shows subfolders as categories in its luts browser
5. back in resolve, click update lists, then save

no restart needed. you can also skip the trip back to project settings: on the colour page, open the luts browser, right-click anywhere inside it and choose refresh.

on a standard install, the folder that button opens is:

• macos: /Library/Application Support/Blackmagic Design/DaVinci Resolve/LUT/
• windows: C:\ProgramData\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve\Support\LUT\

use the button anyway. the free version from the mac app store keeps its luts in a different, sandboxed location, and a path copied from a guide will send you to a folder resolve isn't reading.

keep your luts in your own folder instead

if you'd rather not copy files into resolve's folder at all, resolve can read from a folder of yours. open davinci resolve → preferences → system → general, find lut locations, click add and pick your folder. this is the tidier setup if your luts live on an external drive or in a synced folder you share between machines.

once they're in, the luts browser previews each lut on your clip as you hover, and you can star the ones you use most. more on that in how to add luts to davinci resolve.

or let a plugin do it

luttie for davinci resolve is a free davinci resolve plugin: three small scripts that run from resolve's workspace menu. one of them, sync library, copies every luttie lut your account includes into resolve's luts browser, one folder per pack, so there is nothing to drag anywhere. the free luts come with any account, and pro packs are included if you own them. it needs resolve 21.0 or earlier for now: resolve 21.1 changed what scripts are allowed to do, and a version for it is in the works.

final cut pro: it installs them for you

final cut has no folder you need to hunt for. picking a lut through the custom lut effect copies it into final cut's own library, and it stays in the menu after that.

1. select a clip, open the effects browser (cmd + 5) and add the custom lut effect from the color category
2. in the video inspector, open the lut pop-up menu and pick choose custom lut
3. select your lut files, or a whole folder of them, and click open

per apple's guide, a folder you bring in this way appears as its own submenu, which is the quick way to load a full pack in one go. final cut accepts .cube and .mga files.

the files end up in /Users/<you>/Library/Application Support/ProApps/Custom LUTs/. the same pop-up menu has a reveal in finder option that opens it, which is handy for removing luts you no longer want.

conversion luts for log footage have their own slot. select the clip, open the info inspector, and in the camera lut pop-up menu pick add custom camera lut. those are stored in ProApps/Camera LUTs.

full walkthrough: how to use luts in final cut pro.

capcut: desktop only

capcut desktop keeps a lut once you've brought it in. in the media panel, open adjustments → lut, click import and pick the .cube file. it stays in that panel for later projects.

the phone app is a different story: it has no way to load a custom lut at all. how to use luts in capcut covers what to do instead.

keep the originals somewhere else too

every method here puts a copy of the lut inside an app's own folders. keep your originals in a folder you control as well, for two reasons. a new machine or a clean reinstall starts with empty lut folders. and one .cube file works in all of these apps, so the same folder is your source for each of them.

it's also worth being picky about what goes in. a dropdown with four hundred luts is slower to use than browsing was. install the handful you reach for, and name them so you can tell them apart in a list (slog3-to-rec709.cube rather than lut_01.cube).

making your own lut to install

none of these folders care where a .cube came from. if you want your own look in the menu rather than someone else's, you can grade a frame in the luttie editor in your browser and save the grade as a .cube, then install it with the steps above. grading is free. lut export needs luttie pro.

• free .cube luts to start your library
• pro lut packs for film, portrait, wedding and camera log sets
• where to load a luttie lut in each app
• how to check a lut does what it claims before you install it