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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
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.