Adding Technical & Creative LUTS To The Lumetri Color Panel

Adding Technical & Creative LUTs To The Lumetri Color Panel

October 24, 2015

Using LUTs with the Lumetri Color Panel can be tedious.In this Insight learn how to add LUTs permanently to the panel for quick access


Update July 2018: Are you using Premiere Pro CC 2018 or later? The workaround in the Featured Comment below is covered fully in our new article, Permanently Adding LUTs To The Lumetri Color Panel: 2018 Update. We recommend reading that article for the most current workflow.

Update April 2018: It looks like Adobe has addressed the problem being solved with the ‘workaround’ in this Insight. But it only works with versions of Creative Cloud released in 2018. The workaround is at the Featured Comment, down below!


Get Fast Access To LUTs Without Having To ‘Browse’

As you might know, I’m a fan of the Lumetri Color Panel in Premiere Pro CC 2015.

It’s not that it’s the end all, be all tool for Premiere Pro users wanting to do color natively in their NLE – but it is a major jump forward by Adobe and how they can handle color correction tasks in their NLE.

There are some fantastic tools in the Lumetri Panel, but there are also some issues (excessive highlight/shadow roll off for example). With that said, one of my favorite features is how easy it easy it is to work with both technical & creative LUTs.

Built-In & Browse

Adobe ships Premiere with many technical transform LUTs (found in the Basic section/Input LUT pulldown) as well quite a few creative LUTs (found in the Look pulldown in the Creative section of the Lumetri Color Panel). These LUTs provide quite a few options, but you’ll probably eventually want to use your own technical & creative LUTs.

No problem!

To use your own LUTs, you can simply click the Browse option in either section’s LUT pulldown and navigate to a LUT of your choice.

Here’s the thing – using the Browse option nearly every LUT (in a variety of formats, and a variety of sizes) works well. However, when you want to audition different LUTs, having to click Browse and then navigate to a new LUT of your choice can quickly become tiresome.

The solution?

Add your own LUTs (or those you’ve purchased) to the pulldown menus in the Basic Correction & Creative sections of the Lumetri Color Panel.

But how do you do that?

PLEASE NOTE: The methods described here aren’t supported at all by Adobe. They’ve been tested on a single workstation, using Premiere Pro only. Adobe stores LUTs in different locations, so simply adding your own to the locations noted may break interoperability with other Adobe applications. Please test this workflow thoroughly on your own system. You’ve been warned!

EDIT: October 2017. As Mixing Light member Paul points out in comments below when rendering to AME the LUTs would have to be located in the AME LUT folder as well.

The Work Around

The LUTs that ship with Premiere Pro and are accessible in the Lumetri Color Panel have to live somewhere, right? That idea got me doing a little investigating and I was able to quickly find them.

Mac: Applications/Premiere Pro CC 2015/Show Package Contents/Lumetri  (note show Package Contents is a right/ctrl click option on the application itself).

Windows: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015\Lumetri\

Once you’re in the Lumetri folder you’ll want to look for the Looks and LUTs folders.

As you’ll see in the video below, it’s a pretty straightforward process to add technical LUTs to LUTs > Technical.

But, when it comes to creative looks things get a bit more interesting.

The gist – any creative look you may have won’t work when added to LUTs > Creative!

You have to add creative LUTs to Lumetri > Looks > Cine Looks and then you have to keep in mind the LUTs have to be in the .Look format.

But…

Simply converting .cube, .3DL and other LUTs to the .look format with a LUT converter like Lattice doesn’t seem to work! At least for me.

I’ve only had success adding creative LUTs by ‘washing them’ through Adobe Speedgrade. What I mean by that is adding a LUT to a shot in Speedgrade and then exporting a new .look file.

What’s the difference between a converted LUT to a .look and one ‘washed’ with  Speedgrade?

I HAVE NO IDEA!

I’ve tried various LUT sizes, Export vs. Save-As, and other techniques – only to have the same result. Very frustrating indeed!

My conclusion is that there is some sort of metadata being written in the .Look file by Speedgrade that a converter tool like Lattice doesn’t support.

Workflow Boost, But Not Perfect

Clearly, being able to add LUTs to the Input LUT pulldown of the Basic Correction section or the Look pulldown in the Creative section is a workflow benefit.

But the hoops you have to jump through (currently) to get your own creative looks to work in the Creative Look pulldown does make the ‘Browse’ option for creative looks a bit more attractive at the moment.

I’m hoping (and guessing) that this simply a programming issue with the Lumetri Color Panel – after all, you can browse to nearly any look you want – no matter the format.

If you are able to figure out a work-around other than the one I show in the movie below, PLEASE let me know by using the comments below!

– Robbie

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Comments

Homepage Forums Adding Technical & Creative LUTs To The Lumetri Color Panel

  • I dived in and tried to see if I could find a workaround by deconstructing the included creative LUTs w/o much success. I convert to exactly the same spec (21 sample, cube format, iridasadobe variant) and they are recognized on the custom import but NOT when I add them manually. Wonder if this is something we can ask Adobe? Should be easy to import more creative LUTS and build “lumetri presets” ideally.


  • Robbie Carman
    Guest

    yep I’ve done the same – if you take a closer look there are also the .itx files with the same names for many of the looks. I’m wondering if those itx files are metadata?

  • Ah, the idx files are Iridias 1D luts. Gonna try and do some research to see how to get this working 🙂


  • Robbie Carman
    Guest

    interesting – nice find. Thanks Jason I knew you’d chime in on this one!

  • No problem! Ya, this seems to be a known Adobe issue – https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1876861. Apparently another third-party app called Briz LUT Converter (http://www.brizsoft.com/lut-converter/) MIGHT converts it correctly to the Iridas Cube format(s), but that gets rid of the purpose as washing through SG does the same thing and takes the same amount of time.

    There MAY be a workaround forming between people in that thread, but I haven’t figured it out yet and it’ll likely won’t be “quick” as we’d like it to be. I just put in a feature request for this functionality, as it seems like an obvious feature to have.


  • r.burakyak
    Guest

    All is about your Look file. When you create your look file by SpeedGrape,
    It adds
    [ “File Address” ]
    into look file.
    If you open your look file via notpad, you can see this line.
    If you change the destination LUT from your look file via notpad, it changes.
    Probably you are deleting or changing position of your LUTs folder. So when Premiere tries to open that look file, it doesn’t find the actual file: your LUT file…
    You must save your additional LUTs folder into somewhere safe, It could be in your Premiere’s installation folder.
    I put my LUTs folder in “C:Program FilesAdobeAdobe Premiere Pro CC 2015LumetriLUTs” and I made the whole conversion procces for my 85 LUTs (By Speedgrade, LUT to Look) from beginning. Than I put the look files into “C:Program FilesAdobeAdobe Premiere Pro CC 2015LumetriLooksCine Looks” So I have Succeeded! It works great…


  • Ryan Lifchitz
    Guest

    Thanks for this workaround! I was going crazy trying to figure out how to apply the LUTs my colorist gave me.
    This workflow does work, but now with Premiere 2017 the .look files go here: Lumetri>LUTs>Creative


  • Paul Carlin
    Guest

    Be sure to move your LUTs into the Media Encoder Contents/Lumetri/LUTs folder as well or your Queued renders will not have the LUT applied to them.


  • Robbie Carman
    Guest

    good point!


  • KJ
    Guest

    Hi Robbie, I’m sure you know by now that adding multiple LUTs by hacking the app package is not supported by Adobe. You are supposed to use the Browse button, according to Premiere Pro engineering. I know, it’s slow and cumbersome. Sorry. That said, your hack can cause a good number of terrible issues when sharing projects, using AME, etc., if you don’t know the issues.

    What would be better is a new feature that allows you to add LUTs en masse. So, please, if you would not mind, make a feature request instead of encouraging a hack that can cause a lot of pain for those not covering all the bases in this unsupported workflow. If everyone that read this article did the same thing, that would be awesome. The link is http://www.adobe.com/go/wish I can definitely advocate for that feature on your behalf. See you at NAB!

    Cheers!
    Kevin Monahan
    Support Manager, Adobe DVA


  • Robbie Carman
    Guest

    HI Kevin –

    I wouldn’t say I’m encouraging people, just providing a method to make the workflow possible – and detailed in various ways on the Adobe support forums as well. Of course this method is not supported by Adobe, and I say as much in the first section of the article.

    Perhaps you missed this bit?

    PLEASE NOTE: The methods described here aren’t supported at all by Adobe. They’ve been tested on a single workstation, using Premiere Pro only. Adobe stores LUTs in different locations, so simply adding your own to the locations noted may break interoperability with other Adobe applications. Please test this workflow thoroughly on your own system. You’ve been warned!

    When a member of ours made a comment about AME integration I added to that the article back in October 2017.

    So I feel like I’ve been pretty clear about the unsupported nature of what I’m suggesting.

    Also, thanks for the link here in the comments. I would encourage people to make that request officially. I’ve made it myself many times initially when the Lumetri panel was released in Premiere Pro and at the time this article was published nearly 3 years ago.

    I know the PrPro team is hard a work on many great new features, so hopefully the ability to add ones own custom LUTs in bulk will be a feature that is added.


  • KJ
    Guest

    There is a new feature released today in Premiere Pro and After Effects which allows you to place LUTs in a common folder for all apps. No more hacking of the app package should be done.

    For this feature to function properly, you will need to create specific folders in your computer before importing LUTs into them. In general, create the folders as follows:

    Mac: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/LUTs
    /Creative
    /Technical

    Win: Program FilesAdobeCommonLUTs
    Creative
    Technical

    Place LUTs in these folders, restart the application, and they will appear as you’d expect in the Lumetri Color panel and elsewhere, like in the Lumetri Color effect in After Effects.

    Thanks to all for please spreading the word.


  • KJ
    Guest

    Hey Robbie, check out the new feature that allows you to avoid hacking the app package: just create folders in your Library. I just posted about how to do this.

    Sorry if I was a little harsh. It causes our department a lot of problems with customers complaining about LUTs not appearing on exports. Plus, the engineering guys really do not want users messing around with the app package and I may have overdone it a little there. See you soon, I hope.

    Cheers,
    Kevin


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Kevin – we’ve published a new article that covers your new workflow. You can find it here: https://mixinglight.com/color-tutorial/permanently-adding-luts-lumetri-color-2018/

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