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CUBE → XMP
Turn a 3D LUT into a Lightroom preset. Tone curves come across exactly; colour is estimated — and you get to see the difference rather than take our word for it.
Drop a .cube LUT here
Converted in your browser. Tone curves are extracted exactly; colour is estimated — the comparison below shows you the difference.
Why this conversion is lossy
Going from a preset to a LUT is easy: you evaluate the preset against every colour and write down the answers. Going back is a fitting problem, and the target space is far smaller than the source. A 33³ LUT has 35,937 independent RGB triplets; a Lightroom recipe has on the order of sixty numbers. Most LUTs are simply not in the image of that map.
Converts well
- Film-emulation looks
- Contrast and tone LUTs
- Split-tone / teal-and-orange grades
- Anything essentially a curve + cast
Converts poorly
- Log-to-Rec.709 conversion LUTs
- Heavily hue-targeted grades
- Gamut-compression transforms
- Anything with hard clipping behaviour
Where the preset goes
Camera Raw and both Lightrooms read presets from the same folder, so one file covers all three on a given machine. Drop it in, restart, and it appears under User Presets.
Lightroom Classic / Camera Raw — Windows
%APPDATA%\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings
Lightroom Classic / Camera Raw — macOS
~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/Settings
Lightroom CC (desktop)
Presets panel → ⋯ → Import Presets
Lightroom Mobile
Syncs automatically once imported on desktop
If the preset does not show up, the folder is almost certainly the wrong one — Lightroom Classic keeps a second, legacy location and only reads the Camera Raw path above when Store presets with this catalog is switched off in Preferences → Presets.
After the conversion
The preset is a starting point, not a final answer — the whole reason to convert a LUT is to be able to open it up and change it.
- Inspect the original LUT — the neutral-axis curve and hue-shift map show what the LUT was doing, which tells you whether the residual error is somewhere you care about.
- Dial the LUT back first — a look at 50% is often far easier for a preset to follow than the same look at full strength, because the extremes are where the fit breaks down.
- Take the preset apart in the Studio — replay it stage by stage to see which of the recovered settings is actually carrying the look.
- Convert it back to a LUT — once you have edited the preset, bake it out again for Resolve or Premiere.
Frequently asked questions
Can a LUT be converted into a Lightroom preset perfectly?
No, and any tool claiming otherwise is overselling. A 3D LUT is an arbitrary map from colour to colour with tens of thousands of independent values; a Lightroom preset is roughly sixty parameters with fixed meanings. Most LUTs simply are not expressible in that parameter set. What this tool does is recover the parts that are, and show you the residual rather than hide it.
Which parts are exact and which are estimated?
Tone curves are extracted, not guessed: the LUT's response along its neutral axis is the master curve, and its per-channel ramps are the red, green and blue curves — same domain, same meaning, no fitting involved. Saturation and split toning are estimated from the LUT's hue behaviour and the colour cast it puts on greys. Per-hue remapping beyond an 8-band mixer, gamut compression and anything spatial cannot be carried across at all.
How do I know how good the conversion is?
The page renders the same frame twice — once through your original LUT and once through the generated preset — and puts them either side of a comparison slider. It also reports the mean neutral-axis error in 0–255 units. Under about 2 is excellent; above 6 means the LUT is doing colour work a preset cannot follow.
What kinds of LUT convert well?
Anything that is essentially a tone curve plus a colour cast — most film-emulation and 'look' LUTs fall into this category, and they often round-trip almost exactly. Conversion technology LUTs (log-to-Rec.709 transforms) and heavily hue-targeted creative grades convert poorly, because the bulk of what they do lives in exactly the dimensions a preset cannot express.
Where do I put the .xmp file?
On Windows, %APPDATA%\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings; on macOS, ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/Settings. Restart Lightroom and it appears under User Presets. In Lightroom CC you can import it directly from the presets panel.
Is my LUT uploaded?
No. The .cube is parsed locally, the analysis runs on your CPU and the preview renders on your own GPU. Nothing leaves your machine.
Can Lightroom use a LUT directly, without converting it?
Only in one narrow place, and probably not the one you want. Lightroom Classic has no LUT slot in the Develop module at all. Camera Raw can load a .cube as a creative profile, and Photoshop can apply one through a Color Lookup adjustment layer — but neither of those gives you editable sliders, and neither travels with the photo as a preset. Converting is what turns the look into something you can open up and change.
Is this CUBE to XMP converter free?
Yes — no account, no watermark, no export limit. The conversion runs on your own machine rather than a server, so there is nothing to meter and nothing to charge for.
Does it work with .3dl, .look or .icc files?
Not directly. This tool reads Adobe .cube. A .3dl can be converted to .cube first and then run through here — the 3DL to CUBE tool does that step and is lossless in that direction. Autodesk .look and ICC device profiles are different formats with different purposes and are not supported.
Why does my converted preset look flatter than the LUT?
Almost always because the LUT was a log conversion rather than a creative look. A log-to-Rec.709 transform spends its whole range undoing a camera's log curve, which is exactly the kind of steep, non-parametric work a preset cannot hold. Check the mean neutral-axis error the page reports: above about 6 you are looking at a LUT that a preset cannot represent, and no converter will change that.
A LUT tells you nothing about how it was built.
That is the trade you accept when you bake one: thirty-five thousand answers and no record of the question. The Studio works the other way round — give it a photograph and its recipe and it shows the edit as a sequence of decisions, each one rendered on its own.