How to Save Your Color Adjustments as LUTs for Faster Editing

Creating consistent color across your work is a challenge whether you’re editing one image or building a whole series. LUTs, or lookup tables, give you a simple way to save and apply a particular look over and over again. They’re not just for stills. You can bring them into video projects too, which makes them useful if you want your photos and videos to carry the same style.

Coming to you from Aaron Nace with Phlearn, this practical video walks you through creating, exporting, and importing LUTs in Photoshop. Instead of redoing your color adjustments from scratch every time, you’ll see how to bundle multiple layers, like color balance, levels, and gradient maps, into one LUT. The big advantage is speed and consistency. You can apply the same color treatment to other images with just a few clicks, and you can also use that same LUT in programs like Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.

Nace shows how simple tweaks in Photoshop can quickly shift the mood of an image. Pushing highlights warmer while cooling down shadows gives a cinematic look, and adding gradient maps with lowered opacity introduces subtle tones without overpowering the shot. By turning layers on and off, you can immediately compare variations, which is especially helpful if you’re experimenting with styles. The key step is exporting those adjustments into a LUT file, which then becomes a portable preset you can share across different platforms.

Once you’ve built a LUT, you’re not limited to using it in one session. You can add it to Photoshop’s preset folder so it appears in the standard dropdown list alongside the built-in options. That means you don’t need to reload it every time you want to use it. You’ll also see how to bring the LUT into video editing software, letting you create a cohesive look across an entire body of work. For anyone balancing both still and motion projects, this keeps your style consistent without extra effort. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Nace.