How to install and use a .cube LUT in DaVinci Resolve
You have a .cube file and footage in DaVinci Resolve. Installation is genuinely
simple; the mistakes people make are almost always about where in the pipeline the LUT
is applied, not the file itself.
Installing the file
The easy way (Resolve 17+): Project Settings → Color Management →
"Open LUT Folder", drop your .cube file in, then click "Update Lists". The folder
locations, if you'd rather go direct:
| OS | Path |
|---|---|
| macOS | /Library/Application Support/Blackmagic Design/DaVinci Resolve/LUT/ |
| Windows | C:\ProgramData\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve\Support\LUT\ |
Subfolders you create there become categories in Resolve's LUT browser.
Three ways to apply it
- On a node (recommended): in the Color page, right-click a node → LUT → pick yours. The LUT lives inside your grade where you can control what happens before and after it.
- From the LUT browser: open the LUT gallery, hover to preview on the current clip, double-click to apply to the current node.
- On the clip or timeline level: possible, but it hides the LUT outside the node graph — easy to forget it's there when trouble-shooting.
The node-order rule
A display-referred LUT (built from normal sRGB images — screenshots, photos, exported frames) expects display-referred input. Apply it after your conversion from camera log, and after exposure/white-balance correction. The clean pattern is three serial nodes: normalise → correct → LUT. If the LUT is first and your colour-space transform second, the maths runs on the wrong values and nothing downstream can fix it.
Checking the result
Toggle the node on and off. The look should change; the image structure should not. Banding in skies or posterised shadows that appear with the LUT signal either a low-resolution LUT (17³) or a poorly built one — see how 3D LUTs work for what separates good LUT files from bad ones.
Tonemara does all of this in your browser in one click: drop a reference
image and your own photo, preview the match free, and export a 33×33×33 .cube
LUT plus a Lightroom-compatible .xmp preset. Your images never leave your device.