how to reorder your grading chain in luttie

luttie's grading chain runs as ten separate stages. by default they run in the order most grades want, but you can rearrange them — and for some looks, that changes the result significantly.

here is how.

turning it on

the node graph lives behind advanced mode, which is off by default.

1. open the editor and load an image
2. find the advanced toggle at the top of the control panel on the right
3. switch it on
4. click node graph in the strip below the image

the graph opens full screen. drag the background to pan, scroll to zoom, and press escape to close it.

the ten stages

the chain runs left to right, in this default order:

1. white balance — temperature and tint
2. exposure & contrast
3. color wheels — shadows, midtones, highlights
4. tone — blacks and whites
5. saturation — saturation, vibrance, faded film
6. lut — your loaded .cube or preset
7. hsl secondary — colour range qualifiers
8. curves — master and per-channel
9. vignette
10. film effects — bloom, halation, grain

each node shows a thumbnail of the image as it leaves that stage, so reading left to right shows your grade being built up step by step.

reordering

drag any node left or right. the wires redraw, the chain updates, and every thumbnail downstream of the change refreshes to show the new result.

the number under each node is its position, so it renumbers as you move things.

what is worth trying: move curves before the lut rather than after it, and watch the image change. a lut is a fixed colour-to-colour mapping built for a particular input, so what you feed it matters. the same is true of moving contrast across the lut.

what is not worth trying: swapping saturation and exposure & contrast. those two produce a mathematically identical image in either order — there is a full explanation of why here, along with which other pairs are worth experimenting with.

bypassing a stage

each node has a power button in its bottom corner. clicking it takes that stage out of the chain and dims the card.

bypass does not clear anything. the stage keeps all its settings, so switching it back on restores your grade exactly. that makes it the fastest way to answer "what is this actually doing?" — switch it off, look, switch it on.

one stage behaves slightly differently and it is worth knowing: bypassing exposure & contrast also removes a small baked-in contrast lift that luttie has always applied, so the image will look flatter than simply setting contrast to zero.

what carries through

the order you set is the order everything renders in:

• the preview on screen
• image and video export
• the .cube or .3dl lut export

there is no separate export path to keep in step. bypassed stages are skipped everywhere too, including in the exported lut.

two stages are always left out of a lut export regardless of where you put them — the vignette and grain — because a lut maps colour to colour and holds no information about where a pixel sits. that constraint is explained in full here.

saving and sharing

the chain order and any bypassed stages are part of the grade, not an editor preference. they save with your projects and travel in shared grade links, so someone opening your link sees the chain arranged the way you left it.

a grade made before the node view existed has no order stored, so it runs in the default sequence above — nothing you saved previously will render differently.