Make a LUT on your iPhone and use it in Lightroom and Resolve

26 September 2026

You can make a LUT on your iPhone and use it in DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro and Lightroom. Build the look in an app with real tone and colour controls, export it as a .cube file, and load it in the other app. In Chobial, you build a film, then choose ••• › Export Color LUT (.cube). The LUT carries the film's colour. It doesn't carry grain, halation or anything else that isn't colour.

Most "make a LUT from a photo" results are desktop tools or apps that guess a LUT from a reference picture. Those have their place. This post covers a different route: the look you already shoot with on your phone, exported as a file your video editor understands. You end up with one look for your iPhone photos and your video grade.

What a LUT can and can't hold

A 3D LUT is a table. It samples the colour cube at a grid of points (33 × 33 × 33 in Chobial's export, just under 36,000 entries), and for each input colour it stores an output colour. The editor fills in the colours between the points.

That means a LUT can carry anything that turns one colour into another, the same way wherever it appears in the frame:

• Tone: contrast, highlights, shadows, fade, highlight rolloff, curves.
• Colour: saturation, vibrance, per-hue shifts from a colour mixer, split toning, a channel mixer, black and white conversion.

It can't carry anything that depends on neighbouring pixels or on position in the frame:

• Grain. Grain varies from pixel to pixel. A table that maps colour to colour can't produce it. (For what good grain needs, see why digital grain looks fake.)
• Halation and bloom. Both spread light from bright areas into their surroundings.
• Vignette. It depends on where the pixel sits.
• RAW develop settings. Exposure, white balance shift, noise reduction and sharpening happen before the colour stage, on sensor data your video editor never sees.

Making the LUT in Chobial

Chobial is an iPhone camera where every photo is a RAW negative developed with a film, and films are things you build (guide: Make your own film). Any film you make can be exported as a LUT (guide: Work with .cube LUTs).

1. Open Films: hold the film on the camera, or go to Settings › Manage Films. Tap + › New Film and choose a film under Start From. Built-in films can't be exported directly, but a new film started from one carries its look.
2. Build the look in Tone and Color. Those are the stages that travel. The preview is a real photo from your library, so check it on skin, sky and foliage.
3. Tap Save. Shoot with it for a while. If it survives a week of real light, it's worth exporting.
4. In Films, tap ••• on the film and choose Export Color LUT (.cube). Send the file to your Mac with AirDrop or save it to Files.

The export is a 33-point cube of the film's colour stage: tone, curves, the colour mixer, split toning, the channel mixer, and any LUT you imported into the film. If you imported a LUT and adjusted on top of it, the export carries the combined result.

Chobial is free to shoot, develop and make films. You pay only to export photos (save to Photos, or export DNG).

Using the LUT in DaVinci Resolve

1. Install it: Project Settings › Color Management › Lookup Tables › Open LUT Folder, copy the .cube in, then click Update Lists.
2. On the Color page, add a serial node after your correction nodes.
3. Right-click the node and choose LUTs, then your LUT. Or drag it from the LUT browser onto the node.
4. Use the node's Key Output Gain to dial the strength down if it's too much.

For log footage, put a Color Space Transform or the camera maker's conversion LUT (Apple Log, S-Log3, F-Log to Rec.709) in a node before this one. (Steps from Boris FX and Emerson College's Resolve guide.)

Using the LUT in Final Cut Pro

1. Select the clip in the timeline.
2. Open the Effects browser, choose the Color category, and double-click Custom LUT.
3. In the inspector, find the Custom LUT effect, open its LUT pop-up menu and choose your .cube file.

A Custom LUT is a clip effect, so it sits after Final Cut's Camera LUT, which handles log conversion at the media level. That's the order you want: log conversion first, then the look (Apple: Apply LUTs in Final Cut Pro).

Using the LUT in Premiere Pro

1. Open the Lumetri Color panel and expand Creative.
2. Open the Look menu, choose Browse… and pick the .cube.
3. Use the Intensity slider under it to set the strength.

Use the Creative Look slot, not the Input LUT slot. Input LUT is for technical conversions like log to Rec.709, and it runs first. To have the LUT in the menu permanently, copy it to Premiere's Creative LUT folder (Adobe: Lumetri looks, installing custom LUTs).

Using the LUT in Lightroom and Camera Raw

Lightroom doesn't load .cube files directly. You wrap the LUT in a profile using Camera Raw, then use the profile in Lightroom.

1. Open any photo in Camera Raw (from Photoshop or Bridge).
2. Open the Presets panel. Hold Option (Alt on Windows) and click the Create Preset icon. The dialog opens as Create Profile instead.
3. At the bottom, under Color Lookup Table, open the Table menu, choose Load ".cube" File and pick your LUT.
4. Name the profile, choose a group, and click OK. It appears in the Profile Browser.

(Steps from KelbyOne, August 2024; the Option-click detail is confirmed on Adobe's community forum.) The profile is saved as an .xmp file. In Lightroom (the cloud-based app), use File › Import Profiles & Presets to bring it in, and it syncs to Lightroom on your phone (Adobe: install presets and profiles).

A profile sits early in Lightroom's pipeline, and the rest of your edits run on top. That's a good fit for a look LUT, but for photos, Chobial's film does more than its LUT does. If you shoot the photos in Chobial anyway, the film itself, with its grain and RAW develop, is the better tool.

The honest limits

Two more things to expect:

• It expects display-referred input. The LUT was built for a normal, finished image, which is what Chobial feeds its colour stage. On log footage, convert to Rec.709 first. Put the LUT straight onto flat log and it will look washed out and wrong. This is the mirror image of the problem in shooting through a LUT, where log LUTs go on normal images.
• Expect small differences on Rec.709. Chobial works in Display P3 with an sRGB-style tone curve. A Rec.709 timeline has narrower primaries and, in Resolve's default setup, a different gamma. The look will be recognisably the same, but saturated colours and deep shadows can shift slightly. Check it on a real clip and trim contrast or saturation in a node before the LUT if needed.

One look for photos and video

Many people who shoot both stills and video end up with two looks that almost match: a photo preset and a video LUT, tuned separately and drifting apart. Building the look once, as a film you shoot with every day, and exporting its colour stage keeps them together. The stills keep their grain and halation, and the video gets the same colour with texture added in the edit.

If you want to go the other way and bring a video LUT into your iPhone photos, import it as a film. That post covers which LUTs work. And if you're curious how Chobial's own built-in looks were made, it's in how we solve a film look from photographs.

Questions