Why your LUT looks bad (7 mistakes, and none of them are the LUT)
We sell LUTs, so I've read every version of the email. "This looks nothing like your demo." "The shadows are black." "Everyone's orange." "It made my footage worse."
And I get it. You've spent money, you've dropped the file on your clip, and it looks like a mistake. The natural conclusion is that the LUT is rubbish.
Here's the thing though. In almost every case, when someone sends us the actual clip, the LUT is fine. Something underneath it is wrong, and the LUT is faithfully making that wrong thing more obvious. A LUT is a math function. It doesn't know what your footage looks like. It just does the same transformation to whatever you feed it.
So before you leave a review, run through these. Seven mistakes, in the order I'd check them. I'd bet money one of them is yours.
1. You've put a creative LUT on Log footage
The number one cause, by a mile. If you shot in Apple Log, D-Log M, S-Log3, V-Log, C-Log, Protune flat, or anything else with "log" or "flat" in the name, your footage is intentionally washed out. A creative LUT is built to sit on a normal, corrected image. Put it straight on Log and you get the classic symptoms: crushed blacks, blown highlights, skin that's gone orange, greens that glow and just a muted look.
The fix: apply a conversion LUT first (Log to Rec 709), then the creative LUT on top. Two steps, always in that order. We give the conversion LUTs away free specifically because this problem was generating half our support inbox.
If you're not sure whether you shot Log: if it looked gray in the viewfinder, you did.
2. Your exposure is off
A LUT assumes your image is exposed properly. If you're a stop under, the LUT's shadow curve pushes your already-dark shadows into mud. If you're a stop over, it clips the highlights into flat white and skin goes chalky.
Look at the clip before the LUT. Is there detail in the darkest and brightest parts? If not, the LUT can't put it back.
The fix: correct exposure before the LUT goes on. In Resolve, that's a node before the LUT node. In Premiere, the Basic Correction section sits above the Creative section for exactly this reason. Get the image looking normal and balanced first, then grade.
And for next time: Log footage in particular wants to be exposed a touch bright. Underexposed Log goes noisy the second you convert it.
3. Your white balance is off
Same principle, worse symptoms. A LUT that's designed to warm skin tones and cool shadows will, on a clip that's already too warm, turn everyone into a tangerine. On a clip that's too cool it'll look gray and sickly.
This is usually the reason a LUT looks great on one clip and terrible on the next. The clips weren't matched, so the LUT is doing something different to each.
The fix: white balance every clip before the LUT. Use the eyedropper on something neutral, or just eyeball the skin. Once the clips are consistent, the LUT will be consistent.
4. It's at 100%
Every LUT ships at 100% because it has to ship at something. That's not a recommendation. Most of our demo footage was graded at 60 to 80% intensity, and most of the LUTs you see in the wild that look good are dialed back too.
At full strength a LUT often has too much contrast, too much saturation, and a look that was designed for a specific type of footage that yours isn't quite.
The fix: turn it down. Every editor has an intensity or opacity slider (in Resolve, use the node's key output gain, or put the LUT on an adjustment layer and drop its opacity). Start at 100, pull it back until it looks like it belongs, not like it's been applied. That's usually somewhere around 70.
Check out our cinematic LUTs here
5. Your editor thinks the clip is HDR
This one's specific but common with iPhone footage. Modern iPhones shoot HDR (Dolby Vision) by default. Some editors read that and display the clip in a way that looks washed out or oddly bright, and then a LUT on top of it looks nothing like it should.
Tell-tale sign: the clip looked fine on your phone but looks flat or blown out the moment you import it, even before you've touched it.
The fix: in Premiere, right-click the clip, Modify → Interpret Footage, and set the color space to Rec 709. In Resolve, check the clip's input color space in the Color page. Or, turn HDR video off in your phone's camera settings before your next shoot and save yourself the step.
6. You applied it to everything at once
Adjustment layers are great. Dragging one LUT across a timeline of forty clips from three cameras, two lighting setups and a drone is not.
The LUT isn't doing anything wrong here. It's doing the same thing to clips that needed different things. The daylight exterior looks lovely; the tungsten interior looks like a pumpkin.
The fix: correct each clip individually first (exposure, white balance, and conversion LUT if it's Log), then apply the creative LUT across all of them. Correction per clip, look per timeline. If you've mixed cameras, this is the only order that works.
7. You're judging it on the wrong screen
Slightly annoying one, but true. An uncalibrated laptop screen at max brightness in a bright room shows you a different image to your phone, which shows you a different image to a TV. The LUT that looks crushed on your MacBook in the sun might look perfect on a phone at night, which is where most of your audience is.
The fix: export a ten-second section and look at it on the device your audience uses. If it's Instagram, that's a phone. Adjust based on that, not on your editing monitor.
A quick note on skin
If everything else is right and skin still looks off, that's not a mistake, that's a taste issue, and it's fixable. Most editors let you pull a secondary on skin tones and nudge the hue back toward natural while leaving the rest of the LUT alone. In Resolve that's a qualifier. In Premiere it's the HSL Secondary tab in Lumetri. Two minutes, and it's the difference between a LUT that's 90% there and one that's finished.
How to test if it's actually the LUT
Take a clip you know is properly exposed and white balanced, in normal (non-Log, non-HDR) color, shot in decent light. Apply the LUT at 70%. If that looks wrong, fair enough, it's the LUT or it's simply not for your footage, and that happens. Not every look suits every scene.
But if that clip looks good and your other clip doesn't, the LUT isn't the problem. Go back through the list.
The order, one more time
Because it's the whole thing really:
- Exposure and white balance corrected
- Conversion LUT, if Log
- Creative LUT, backed off from 100%
- Grain and overlays on top
- Check on a phone
Get that sequence right and most LUTs on the market, including the free ones, look better than you thought they did.
Check this next post out on how to make your content look less digital.
