If you’ve spent time building colour palettes or managing design assets, you probably have piles of colour data sitting in .csv, .xlsx, .ods, or even plain .txt files. These formats are great for storage and sorting, but not so great when you want to move into the world of color grading and cinematic effects.
So we built our text and swatch to LUT creator which can be found here.
What sources can I use?
Structured files – such as .csv, .xlsx, or .ods – can be used to lay out colors in clear columns, where for example :
Column A is the palette name (and will become the name of the generated LUT); #FF9E7A
Column B the Shadow colour, #76A1A4 and
Column C the Highlight colour ( both in Hex). eg: Peach Highlights : #FF9E7A Shadows :
Even swatch images (.png, .jpg) can work; the color codes are drawn right onto the image or baked into metadata. eg:: The app has the intelligence to sort the swatch from dark to light if the swatch is not presented that way.
With the 2 hex values your “White” will become the specific highlight colour, and your “Black” the shadow colour. Those ‘anchor’ points to shape how the LUT transforms every other possible color.
That’s where 33³ Cube LUTs come in. They’re more than just fancy tables. Imagine a 3D grid – 33 points along each axis, so 35,937 points in total. Every single point defines a specific input color by its Red, Green, and Blue coordinates and says, “Hey, here’s the color you should become.”
This setup lets you make really precise, nuanced changes across the whole RGB range – way beyond what you get just tweaking sliders in Photoshop.