LUTs vs presets — what is the difference?
Photographers say preset, video people say LUT, and the two are not the same thing. Which one you want depends on whether you intend to keep editing.
If you have been looking for a film look, you have probably seen the same thing sold under three names: a LUT, a preset, and a profile. They overlap enough to be confusing and differ enough to matter.
A preset is a list of slider positions
A Lightroom preset records where the sliders were: exposure +0.3, highlights −40, a few points in the tone curve, some HSL adjustments. Loading it moves your sliders to those positions. That has one enormous advantage — everything stays editable. You can see exactly what it did and change any part of it.
It also has one enormous limitation: a preset only means something inside the program it was made for. A Lightroom preset is meaningless in Premiere, DaVinci Resolve or Capture One, because those programs do not have the same sliders.
A LUT is a colour mapping
A LUT does not touch sliders. It is a table that says: this exact colour in, that exact colour out. Nothing about it is specific to any application, which is why the same .cube file works in Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere, Resolve, Final Cut, Capture One, Affinity and OBS.
The trade is that it is opaque. You cannot open a LUT and see "it lifted the shadows by 12" — you only see the result. To adjust it you work before or after it, not inside it.
A profile is a LUT that Lightroom adopted
This is where the confusion peaks. When you import a .cube into Lightroom it appears under Profiles, not Presets, and it arrives with an Amount slider. Functionally that is the best of both: portable like a LUT, fadeable like a preset, and — importantly — it does not consume your sliders, so your exposure and white balance edits stay yours.
Which should you use?
| Preset | LUT / profile | |
|---|---|---|
| Works across apps | No | Yes |
| Editable afterwards | Fully | Strength only |
| Uses up your sliders | Yes | No |
| Works on video | No | Yes |
| Adapts to your exposure | Somewhat | No |
Use a preset when you want a starting point you will keep tweaking, and you live inside one application. Use a LUT when you want a specific, repeatable look applied consistently — across photos, across applications, or across photo and video in the same project.
One thing neither can do
Presets fail in a way people rarely mention: because they are absolute slider values, a preset built on a correctly exposed photo does something quite different to one shot two stops darker. LUTs have the same problem for the same reason. Correct your exposure and white balance first, then apply the look. Neither format is intelligent enough to compensate for you.
What this site gives you
All 296 looks here are .cube LUTs, so they work everywhere and load into Lightroom as profiles with an Amount slider. If you would rather skip the file entirely, the tool applies them in the browser and exports at full resolution — no install, no account, and nothing uploaded.