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XMP → CUBE
Turn a Lightroom preset into a 3D LUT you can use in Resolve, Premiere or Final Cut. Drop the sidecar, download the .cube. Everything happens in your browser — the file never leaves your machine.
Drop your .xmp preset here
Converted in your browser — the file is never uploaded. Works with Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC and Camera Raw sidecars.
What actually gets converted
A Lightroom sidecar is a list of parameters; a LUT is a lookup table of colours. Converting between them means evaluating the parameters against every colour a frame can contain. RawCut does that by rendering an identity cube — 35,937 known input colours — through the same WebGL pipeline that draws the Studio preview, then reading the results back. The LUT is therefore a measurement of the real grade, not a re-implementation of it.
Converts
- Exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows
- Whites, blacks and dehaze
- Temperature & tint
- Vibrance & saturation
- Point and parametric tone curves (RGB + per-channel)
- The 8-band HSL mixer
- Split toning
- Three-way colour grading
Cannot convert
- Radial, linear & brush masks
- AI subject / sky selections
- Sharpening & noise reduction
- Vignette & grain
- Lens & perspective corrections
All of these are spatial or per-pixel effects. A colour lookup table has no way to express them.
What survives the conversion, and what cannot
A preset is a list of instructions; a LUT is a table of answers. Anything the preset does to a colour regardless of where that colour sits in the frame converts exactly. Anything that depends on position has no representation in a LUT at all — not because the converter is weak, but because a 3D LUT is given one colour at a time and is told nothing about the pixel it came from.
| Converts exactly | Cannot convert |
|---|---|
| Exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks | Brush, radial and linear masks |
| White balance and tint | Vignettes and post-crop vignetting |
| Tone curve, master and per-channel | Grain, texture and clarity |
| HSL — hue, saturation and luminance per band | Sharpening and noise reduction |
| Split toning and colour grading wheels | Lens corrections, transforms, crops |
| Vibrance and saturation | Camera and lens profiles |
The converter says so rather than failing quietly: when a preset contains masks, you are told before you download, so a LUT that looks weaker than the preset has a reason you already know.
Where the .cube file goes
The exported file is a standard Adobe-format 3D LUT, so anything that reads LUTs will take it. The three that matter differ only in where they look:
- DaVinci Resolve — copy it into the LUT folder (Windows:
C:\ProgramData\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve\Support\LUT; macOS:/Library/Application Support/Blackmagic Design/DaVinci Resolve/LUT), then press Update Lists in Project Settings → Color Management. Apply it on its own node near the end of the chain. Full guide. - Premiere Pro and After Effects — no installation needed. In Lumetri Color, open the Creative tab and use Browse under Look, or load it as an Input LUT in the Basic Correction tab if it is a technical transform.
- Final Cut Pro — add the Custom LUT effect to the clip and choose the file from its inspector.
- Photoshop and Affinity Photo — a Color Lookup adjustment layer, loading the file as a 3DLUT.
- OBS Studio — the Apply LUT filter on a source, which is how a Lightroom look ends up on a live stream.
If the result looks wrong in a video application, the usual cause is not the LUT but the footage: a look built on ordinary photographs expects ordinary contrast, and log footage fed through it comes out flat and milky. Convert to the space the look expects first, then apply it.
After the conversion
A baked LUT is a fixed object, but it does not have to stay the way it came out. If the look is too strong at full strength, the strength mixer blends it back toward neutral and writes the reduced version into the file, so it survives to software with no opacity control. If a target insists on a particular grid, the resizer resamples between 17³, 33³ and 65³ and tells you what the resample cost. And if you want to see what the LUT is actually doing before shipping it, the CUBE viewer plots its tone response and hue shifts.
Frequently asked questions
Is this XMP to CUBE converter really free?
Yes. There is no account, no watermark, no export limit and no paid tier. The conversion runs on your own machine, so there is no server cost to pass on.
Are my presets uploaded anywhere?
No. The .xmp is read by your browser using the local File API and the LUT is baked on your own GPU. Nothing is transmitted to RawCut or to any third party. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and the converter still works.
What LUT size does it export?
Whichever you pick: 17³, 25³, 33³, 41³, 49³ or 65³, in Adobe .cube or Autodesk .3dl. 33³ is the default because it is the size Adobe's own documentation uses and every editor expects — 35,937 entries, fine enough that banding is not a practical concern. Go smaller for hardware LUT boxes and camera monitors that cap at 17³. Go larger only for a look with hard hue keys or steep contrast: for most grades a bigger grid is a bigger file describing the same transform.
Will the LUT look identical to Lightroom?
It will match RawCut's render of the preset exactly, because the LUT is baked by rendering an identity cube through the same WebGL pipeline that draws the preview. Against Lightroom itself expect a close but not pixel-identical match: Adobe's process versions and camera profiles are proprietary and are not part of the sidecar.
Why are masks and local adjustments missing from my LUT?
A 3D LUT is a colour-to-colour mapping with no spatial component — it cannot know that a change applied only to the sky or inside a radial gradient. Global settings (exposure, contrast, white balance, tone curves, HSL, split toning and colour grading) all convert. Anything mask-based cannot, and the converter tells you when a preset contains masks rather than dropping them silently.
Which applications accept the exported .cube file?
DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Photoshop (Color Lookup adjustment layer), Affinity Photo, OBS Studio and most modern NLEs and camera monitors.
Can I use my Lightroom presets in DaVinci Resolve?
Not directly — Resolve cannot read .xmp files at all. Convert the preset to a .cube here, drop it into Resolve's LUT folder and press Update Lists in Project Settings → Color Management. From that point it behaves like any other LUT, and can go on a node, on a Timeline-level node, or into Color Management as an output transform.
How do I convert a Lightroom preset to a LUT for free?
Drop the .xmp on this page and download the .cube. There is no account, no watermark and no export cap, and the conversion happens in your browser rather than on a server — which is also why there is nothing to charge for. If your preset is still in the old .lrtemplate format, convert it to .xmp first; Lightroom stopped importing .lrtemplate in 2018.
Can I go the other way, from a LUT back to a preset?
Yes, with the caveat that the reverse direction is an approximation rather than an exact conversion — a LUT holds tens of thousands of independent values and a preset holds roughly sixty parameters, so most LUTs simply are not expressible as one. The CUBE to XMP tool extracts the tone curves exactly, estimates colour, and shows you a side-by-side of what the approximation cost.
A LUT tells you what. RawCut tells you how.
The Studio replays the same preset as a six-stage timeline — light, curves, colour, masks, finish — with red overlays showing exactly where each mask shaped the frame.
Open the Deconstruction Engine →Keep learning
You have the preset. Do you know what it does?
A preset is sixty numbers, and most of them barely matter. Drop the photo and its sidecar into the Studio and the edit replays in six stages — light, curves, colour, masks, finish — so you can see which decision actually carried the look rather than guessing from the finished frame.