Shotcut tutorial · companion page
Shotcut can load a .cube file but it cannot build one, so the LUT is authored somewhere else — in Affinity, free since late 2025. The clever half is that you never grade by eye: you pull a five-colour palette straight out of a photo whose look you want, map it onto a still exported from your own footage with a Gradient Map, and export the result as .cube at 64 x 64 x 64. Then one LUT (3D) filter puts it on the whole clip.
Reading in another language? Use the translate picker in the header, or your browser’s own translate command — the Shotcut and Affinity filter, panel and value names are marked to stay in English so they still match what is on your screen.
Two LUTs get built in this video and both are exported from the same still. Nothing is purchased, nothing is scripted and the only file that ever crosses back into Shotcut is a .cube.
The LUT (3D) filter has exactly two controls — an Open... button and an Interpolation dropdown. There is no create, no save, no edit. Every LUT you will ever use in Shotcut was made in some other program; this tutorial is about making that other program free.
Create Palette from Image... reduces any reference photo to a handful of representative colours. Those colours — not the photo, and not a curve traced off it — are what carries the look across. It is why the method works on a screen grab from a film as readily as on a stock photo.
A gradient map repaints an image by luminance: darkest pixels take the leftmost stop, brightest the rightmost. Drop the stolen palette onto those stops in order and the reference’s colour relationships land on your own frame. On its own it looks awful — which is the point of the next card.
Soft Light pushes the mapped colour through the original instead of replacing it; Opacity at 80 % decides how far. Both are baked into the exported file, which is how you get a LUT that is already the right strength — something Shotcut’s own LUT (3D) filter cannot do to a LUT after the fact.
[ And then we’re done. This is your color grade. No, just kidding. This looks terrible. ]
Ben Espanto · 11:21
The video ships with a twenty-entry chapter list, and it does not survive contact with the footage. Everything up to 1:05 is correct. From 1:05 onward every single title is wrong: the list crams all twenty marks into the first nine and a half minutes of a twenty-and-a-half minute video and then stops, so its last ten minutes describe nothing at all. “What a LUT Actually Is” at 1:05 is the About dialog. “Importing Footage into Shotcut” at 3:20 is the palette-building step. “Common Mistakes to Avoid” at 8:05 does not happen anywhere in the video. The cards below were rebuilt by reading the frames; the twenty-one marked DERIVED are ours. The three marked BEN’S carry his six accurate marks, folded together because six chapter breaks inside sixty-five seconds is more than that stretch can carry. Click any screencap or timestamp to play that moment right here in the card.
“Are you tired of paying for LUTs? Or searching the web for free LUTs? Why not make your own?”
0:00 · the cold open, over promenade footage from Spain. The premise of the whole video is in the first sentence: stop hunting for somebody else’s look and build one.
“I’m not only going to show you how to make your own LUTs, I’m going to show you how to steal another video or image’s look and make it into a LUT.”
0:09 – 0:27 · two of Ben’s own chapter marks, both accurate. The second one, Everything Used Is Free, is the claim this page checks at the bottom of the settings section. The short version: it holds, with one sign-up attached.
“I don’t really plan on being a professional video editor, so I was looking for a free easy-to-learn video editing software. Luckily, I stumbled on Shotcut.”
0:28 – 1:05 · the standing intro that opens every tutorial on the channel, cut over b-roll. Ben’s chapter marks at 0:28, 0:38 and 0:49 all line up with what is actually said.
“Before I begin, I want to show you what Shotcut version I’m using, even though it’s not going to matter for this tutorial. I’m using Shotcut version 25.10.31.”
1:05 · About Shotcut is opened on screen and reads Shotcut version 25.10.31, Copyright © 2011-2025 Meltytech, LLC. The published chapter list calls this stretch What a LUT Actually Is — it is not. Nowhere in the twenty minutes does Ben define what a lookup table is.
“I’ve already preloaded some footage. I preloaded a video that I took when I visited Spain. So this is a beach in Sitges in Spain.”
1:22 · one clip, VID_20250423_034652_00_002.mp4, on V1. The title bar reads Untitled* - 3840x2160 29.97fps 2ch - Shotcut, so this is a 4K project. The clip runs 00:01:04.037. No second track is ever created and nothing else is imported into Shotcut.
“As you can see here, the preview scaling is at 720. So I’m going to go to none. And then I’m going to go to proxy to make sure that I don’t use proxy as a previewer.”
1:49 · Settings → Preview Scaling opens on 720p with the dot beside it; he picks None. Then Settings → Proxy → Use Proxy — the box beside it is already clear, so this step is a check rather than a change. Both exist for one reason: the still you are about to export must come from full-resolution pixels.
“All I’m going to do is I’m going to export this frame. And I’m just going to call this one frame one. I’m going to save that. So now I have that on my desktop.”
2:11 · File → Export → Frame... (Ctrl+Shift+E). The dialog is titled Export Frame, the name typed is Frame 1 and Save as type is PNG (*.png). It lands on the Desktop as an 11,307 KB file — the same 3840×2160 as the project.
“You’re going to need to download a free photo editing software called Affinity Studio. Luckily, it’s just become free in the last three months.”
2:35 · the address bar reads affinity.studio/download and the page says “Affinity gives you pro-grade photo editing, vector design, illustration, and layout — all in one app, for free.” Two buttons, Download for macOS and Download for Windows. Ben takes Windows, Intel. At the end of setup it asks for a Canva account; a free one is enough and it is what unlocks the app.
“You do want to make sure that when you’re in Affinity that you are on the pixel tab instead of the vector. Vector is Affinity’s version of Illustrator and pixel is their version of Photoshop.”
3:43 · Frame 1.png is dragged into a new Affinity document and stretched to fill the canvas — Ben deliberately leaves people in shot. The persona strip along the top reads Vector / Pixel / Layout / Canva AI, and Pixel is the one lit. Document is 3300 × 2550px, RGBA/8 - sRGB IEC61966-2.1.
“For this first trick, the most important panel we have to have is the swatches panel. Windows, General, Swatches.”
4:39 · Window → General → Swatches. The submenu lists Assets, Brushes, Color, Export Layers, History, Layers, Navigator and the rest; Swatches is near the bottom. Ben docks it beside Histogram and Color in the right-hand group. It is the only panel this method needs.
“Prior to loading up Affinity, I downloaded a photo from Pexels.com, which is this one, and it has that classic orange and teal look. So this is the look that we’re going to steal.”
5:11 · the reference on the Desktop: a woman in a teal dress against an orange wall. The file is pexels-theivancauich-17676049, JPG File, 983 KB. Pexels is named aloud and the filename carries the photographer’s handle; no browser session or download is shown, so this page does not link a page that was never on screen.
“At the very top right, there’s going to be a little arrow. And what we’re going to look for is Create Palette from Image. You can actually do this with three colors. It’s actually easier with three colors, but I want to make sure that I have the widest range.”
6:06 · the Swatches panel menu, then Create Palette from Image.... The dialog is titled Create Palette From Image and carries Select Image..., a preview, Number of Colors: with the value 5, a Preview button, Location: Application and Create / Cancel. Five is deliberate — and it is also what makes step 14 fiddly.
“We’re going to go back into the layers panel and with the layers tab selected, we’re going to go to adjustments right here with that icon. We’re going to select that and we’re going to look for gradient map.”
7:21 · the adjustments button at the foot of the Layers panel. The list runs Levels..., White Balance..., HSL..., Recolor..., Black and White..., Brightness and Contrast..., Posterize..., Vibrance..., Exposure..., Threshold..., Curves..., Channel Mixer..., Gradient Map..., Selective Color..., Color Balance... — and further down, a LUT... adjustment that loads one rather than making one.
“When you first load the gradient map, you’re going to see three dots on the gradient. The shadows is represented by the red dot, the mid tones by the green dot, and then the highlights by the blue dot. So because we have five swatches, I’m going to make two more dots.”
8:02 · the picture goes lurid green — that is the default red-green-blue ramp doing its job, not a mistake. Ben inserts one stop between shadows and midtones and another between midtones and highlights, giving five stops for five swatches. The panel carries Add Preset, Merge, Delete, Reset, Position, Color, Insert, Reverse, Opacity and Blend Mode.
“You’re going to see a little dropper icon here. And what you’re going to need to do is click and hold, and then drag that to your swatches. And as you can see, it’s going to magnify everything, and I’m going to select the swatch that I think should be the representative color for the shadows.”
8:53 – 11:21 · the longest stretch of the video, and the only place taste enters. Click a stop, click its colour chip, then click-and-hold the dropper and drag it over a swatch — the cursor magnifies so you can land on the right one. Darkest swatch to the leftmost stop, lightest to the rightmost. Ben openly stalls on the middle one: two of the five are different hues at similar lightness and he picks by eye.
“And then we’re done. This is your color grade. No, just kidding. This looks terrible. So the next thing we’re going to do is go to that layer, and instead of normal here, we’re going to look for — let’s see — soft light.”
11:21 · at Normal the gradient map replaces the picture with the palette, which is useless. The dropdown on the layer row is the whole technique: Normal, Pigment, Darken, Multiply, Color Burn, Linear Burn, Darker Color, Lighten, Screen, Color Dodge, Add, Lighter Color, Overlay, Soft Light, Hard Light, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Pin Light, Hard Mix, Difference, Exclusion and more below. Ben walks most of them on camera and settles on Soft Light.
“It might be a little too harsh when you use the soft light. And so what we can do is we can change the opacity, because right now it’s 100 and this is zero. So if we want a more normal orange and teal look, maybe right there, about 80%.”
12:33 · Blend Mode at Soft Light, layer Opacity at 80 %. This is the intensity control — and it is the one the Shotcut side does not have. Inside Shotcut a LUT (3D) filter runs at full strength, which is exactly the problem the LUT intensity page solves with a four-filter mask sandwich. Here you simply bake the strength you want into the file.
“Now we’re going to need to save this look as a LUT. And so it’s really easy with Affinity, because all you have to do is go file, export, and then choose LUT. And then quality — one YouTuber I saw saved it at about 64, 64, 64.”
13:05 · File → Export → LUT.... The dialog is Export LUT, with Title, Format set to .cube, and a Quality slider reading (64 x 64 x 64) — it opens at (60 x 60 x 60) and Ben drags it up. The preview pane is a stock kitten photo with the grade applied live; Load Preview Image swaps it. The Windows save dialog that follows uses File name: New LUT and Save as type: CUBE Files.
“So now while that is selected, I’m going to go to filters, I’m going to click the plus sign, and I’m going to type LUT — LUT 3D. And then I’m going to open. And I’m going to go to my desktop, I’m going to look for that new LUT that we just created.”
13:49 · the filter is LUT (3D) under Video. Its entire control set is an Open... button, the loaded filename beside it, and Interpolation on Trilinear. The file chooser is titled Open 3D LUT File and filters on 3D-LUT Files (*.3dl *.cube *.dat).
“Not only did I just make my own LUT, but I also was able to steal the look of this picture by grabbing the color palette from this picture and then converting that into a LUT.”
14:45 · New LUT.cube is loaded and the clip carries the grade. Ben’s summary of the method is worth reading twice: find a look you like anywhere, screen-grab it, pull its palette, drop the palette into a gradient map, export. Nothing about it is specific to this photo.
“Another way to do that is instead of using a gradient map — I’m just going to get rid of this layer here. Go into the adjustment layer and then choose another adjustment layer. Let’s go with color balance. I like curves.”
15:46 · the gradient map layer is deleted and two plain adjustment layers go on the same still: Color Balance on Tonal Range: Midtones at Cyan / Red 34 %, Magenta / Green 0 %, Yellow / Blue -72 %, then Curves with three points pulled into an S. Any adjustment stack you can build in Affinity can leave as a LUT — the palette trick is one route in, not the only one.
“Once again, all you have to do is go to file, export, export LUT, name your LUT up here. Again, I don’t know if this is correct — someone correct me if I’m wrong. I’ve just seen someone use 64, 64, 64.”
17:13 · the same Export LUT dialog, this time with New one again typed into Title and the quality slider back at (64 x 64 x 64). Note what Ben skipped the first time: on the first export he left Title at its default Exported LUT and only named the file. The Title field is the name written inside the .cube, not the filename.
“Instead of the new LUT that I previously created, use the new one again, open that. And it’s now implemented a brand new LUT that’s a little bit more contrasty. So here’s me toggling on and off.”
17:42 · the same LUT (3D) filter, Open... again, New one again.cube in its place. There is no second filter and no second instance — changing the look means changing the file the filter points at. The checkbox beside the filter name is the before-and-after.
“My very first video — that’s actually what popularized my videos, because I was giving away free LUTs that I’ve created. I actually created those in Photoshop. But now you have a brand new free option, which is through Affinity.”
18:13 – 20:26 · the payoff and the sign-off. The LUTs Ben gave away years ago were made in Photoshop; the point of this video is that the same job now costs nothing. The published chapter list stops at 9:30 and claims the video ends there — there are still eleven minutes to go at that mark.
Every value below was read off the pixels of the video, not off the audio. Where something was never shown on screen — an Affinity version number, a download URL, a folder that LUTs must live in — this page says so instead of filling the gap.
The still you are about to export is the thing you will grade, so it has to come from full-resolution pixels. Two settings can quietly downscale what Shotcut hands you.
The Preview Scaling submenu offers None (F6), 360p (F7), 540p (F8), 720p (F9) and 1080p. Ben’s was sitting on 720p. Use Proxy (F4) is a check, not a change — the box was already clear.
Pick a moment with the range of tones the grade has to survive — sky, skin, shadow. Then File → Export → Frame..., or Ctrl+Shift+E.
The submenu under Export reads Frame... Ctrl+Shift+E, Video/Audio... Ctrl+E, Markers as Chapters... and EDL.... It is the first one you want, not the second.
The download page shown on screen is affinity.studio/download. It offers Download for macOS and Download for Windows; Ben takes Windows, and picks the Intel build for his machine. At the end of setup the installer asks you to sign in with a Canva account.
A free Canva account is enough. Ben is explicit twice: you do not need Canva Pro, and the account exists only to unlock the app. That sign-up is the one piece of friction in a tutorial whose headline is that everything is free.
The version of Affinity is never shown — the About dialog is not opened — so this page does not state one. What is on screen is a single unified app whose persona strip reads Vector / Pixel / Layout / Canva AI, which is how you can tell you have the right thing.
Drag Frame 1.png onto a new document and stretch it to fill the canvas. Then check the persona strip: Vector is Affinity’s Illustrator, Pixel is its Photoshop, and this is pixel work.
Ben nudges the frame so people stay in shot rather than centring it. That is not fussiness: skin tones are the hardest thing for a stolen palette to survive, so you want them visible while you work.
Window → General → Swatches. Dock it wherever you like — Ben puts it in the right-hand group beside Histogram and Color. It is the only panel this method adds.
The rest of that submenu, for orientation: Assets, Brushes, Color, Export Layers, Export Options, History, Layers, Links, Navigator, Quick Adjustments, Quick Export, Slices, Snapshots, States, Swatches, Transform.
Anything will do — a stock photo, a frame grabbed off a film, a still from a director whose work you like. Ben’s is a free Pexels photo of a woman in a teal dress against an orange wall: the textbook orange-and-teal pairing, with the two hues cleanly separated.
No browser session, search or download is shown for this photo, so there is no URL to give you and this page will not invent one. Pick your own; the method does not depend on this image.
Pick a reference with an obvious dark, an obvious mid and an obvious light. A flat reference yields five swatches that are nearly the same brightness, and step 08 becomes guesswork.
Click the small chevron at the top right of the Swatches panel and choose Create Palette from Image.... In the dialog, click Select Image..., pick the reference, set the count, and click Create.
The five colours Affinity returned from Ben’s reference, sampled from the dialog itself:
Ben says out loud that three colours would have been easier and takes five anyway, for the wider range. He is right on both counts: five stops means two extra dropper drags and two extra judgement calls about which swatch is darker. If this is your first attempt, use three.
Those hex values were sampled off the dialog’s own swatch strip in the video frame — Affinity never displays them as numbers, so treat them as close rather than exact. The palette is stored with Location set to Application, which means it stays available to every document rather than travelling with this one.
With the Layers tab selected, click the adjustments button at the foot of the panel and choose Gradient Map.... The image turns lurid green. That is correct — you are seeing the default red-to-green-to-blue ramp painted onto your frame by luminance.
The map opens with three stops, and they map onto the same three zones as a colour grading control: the red stop is shadows, the green stop is midtones, the blue stop is highlights. Click on the gradient bar between them to insert more. Five swatches need five stops.
Panel controls: Add Preset, Merge, Delete, Reset across the top; Position, Color, Insert, Copy, Reverse, Delete underneath; and Opacity plus Blend Mode along the bottom. The last two are the ones that matter, in step 10.
Select a stop, click its Color chip to open the colour tab, then click and hold the dropper icon and drag it over the swatch you want. The cursor magnifies as you drag, so you can land on the right one. Release, and the stop takes that colour.
Work in order of lightness: darkest swatch onto the leftmost stop, lightest onto the rightmost. Read off the finished gradient bar, Ben’s five stops ended up as #3E4243, #9F521C, #C16E08, #71B5B6, #97BEB9 — which is the palette in exact order of luminance, so his eye was right even where he was unsure.
This is the only place in the whole method where you are making an aesthetic choice, and Ben does not pretend otherwise — he stalls audibly on the middle stop because two of his five swatches are different hues at similar lightness and there is no correct answer. If you cannot rank them by eye, that is the sign your palette should have had three colours instead of five.
Nearly three minutes of the video, 8:53 to 11:21, is this one operation repeated five times. It goes much faster once you have done it once.
At Normal the gradient map has replaced your picture with a poster. Change the layer’s blend mode and it starts compositing against the original instead of covering it. Ben walks most of the list on camera and lands on Soft Light. Then he drops Opacity to take the edge off.
Those two numbers are the whole grade, measured rather than asserted: red rises by 15, green falls by 8 and blue falls by 18. That is precisely the orange-and-teal move — warm the frame and take blue out of it — arrived at without touching a colour wheel.
Blend modes in the dropdown, in order: Normal, Pigment, Darken, Multiply, Color Burn, Linear Burn, Darker Color, Lighten, Screen, Color Dodge, Add, Lighter Color, Overlay, Soft Light, Hard Light, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Pin Light, Hard Mix, Difference, Exclusion, and more below the fold. Ben audibly tries Multiply, Color Burn, Color Dodge and Screen on the way past.
File → Export → LUT.... This is the step Shotcut cannot do and the reason Affinity is in this tutorial at all.
The quality slider is a grid size, not a compression setting. It opens at (60 x 60 x 60) and Ben nudges it to (64 x 64 x 64) — on the honest grounds that he saw another YouTuber use it. He says so out loud twice: “I don’t know if this is correct. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.” A larger grid stores more sample points and so reproduces the grade more faithfully at the cost of file size; 64 x 64 x 64 is a common production value and nothing in this video argues against it.
Watch the difference between Title and the filename. Title is written inside the .cube file; the filename is set in the Windows save dialog afterwards. On his first export Ben leaves Title at its default Exported LUT and names the file New LUT.cube, so the two do not match. On the second he types New one again into both. Name both if you want to find things later.
Select the clip, open Filters, click the + button, type lut and pick LUT (3D). Then click Open... and choose the file.
Ben keeps his LUTs in Desktop → SHOTCUT Stuff → Bentacular LUTs, but that is his filing, not a requirement — Open... opens an ordinary file browser and a LUT works from anywhere. The video never shows a folder Shotcut scans automatically, so this page does not claim one exists.
To change the look, you do not add a second filter. You click Open... again on the same LUT (3D) filter and point it at a different file. That is the whole reason the second half of the video reuses one filter rather than stacking two.
Read off the frames of the video. Where a value could not be read — the Affinity version, a download URL for the reference photo, the on-disk home of a LUT — the row says so rather than guessing.
| Setting | Value | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Shotcut version | 25.10.31 | Help → About Shotcut |
| Copyright line | Copyright © 2011-2025 Meltytech, LLC | About Shotcut |
| Project video mode | 3840x2160 29.97fps 2ch | Shotcut title bar |
| Source clip | VID_20250423_034652_00_002.mp4 · 00:01:04.037 | Timeline |
| Track layout | V1 only | Timeline · no second track at any point |
| Preview Scaling | 720p → None | Settings → Preview Scaling |
| Use Proxy | Unchecked throughout | Settings → Proxy |
| Still export | File → Export → Frame... · Ctrl+Shift+E | Dialog titled Export Frame |
| Still filename and type | Frame 1 · PNG (*.png) · 11,307 KB | Desktop |
| Still dimensions | 3840x2160 pixels @ 285x254dpi | Affinity context bar for the placed layer |
| The only Shotcut filter used | LUT (3D) | Category Video |
| LUT (3D) controls, in full | Open... · filename label · Interpolation · reset | There is no create, save or edit control |
| Interpolation | Trilinear | Shown, never changed |
| LUT file chooser | Open 3D LUT File | Filter: 3D-LUT Files (*.3dl *.cube *.dat) |
| LUT folder Ben uses | Desktop → SHOTCUT Stuff → Bentacular LUTs | His filing — not a location Shotcut requires |
| Setting | Value | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Application | Affinity | Downloaded from affinity.studio/download |
| Affinity version | Never shown on screen | The About dialog is not opened in this video |
| Persona in use | Pixel | Strip reads Vector / Pixel / Layout / Canva AI |
| Account required | A free Canva account | Asked for at the end of setup |
| Document | 3300 × 2550px, 8.42MP, RGBA/8 - sRGB IEC61966-2.1 | Affinity title bar |
| Panel added | Swatches | Window → General → Swatches |
| Palette command | Create Palette from Image... | Swatches panel menu · chevron, top right |
| Palette dialog | Create Palette From Image | Select Image... · Number of Colors: · Preview · Location |
| Number of Colors | 5 | Ben says three is easier and takes five anyway |
| Location | Application | Palette is available to every document, not just this one |
| Reference image | pexels-theivancauich-17676049 · JPG · 983 KB | Pexels named aloud · no URL on screen |
| Adjustment used | Gradient Map | Adjustments button at the foot of Layers |
| Stops on the gradient | 3 by default → 5 | Red = shadows, green = midtones, blue = highlights |
| Stop colours, shadows to highlights | #3E4243 · #9F521C · #C16E08 · #71B5B6 · #97BEB9 | Sampled off the finished gradient bar · the palette in luminance order |
| Layer Blend Mode | Normal → Soft Light | Layers |
| Layer Opacity | 100 % → 80 % | Layers |
| Export command | File → Export → LUT... | Siblings in that submenu: Export... Ctrl+Alt+Shift+W, As Template... |
| Export dialog | Export LUT | Title · Format · Quality · Preview · Load Preview Image |
| Format | .cube | Windows save dialog then offers CUBE Files |
| Quality | (60 x 60 x 60) default → (64 x 64 x 64) | Grid size, not compression · Ben’s stated source is another YouTuber |
| LUT one · the stolen palette | LUT two · plain adjustment layers | |
|---|---|---|
| Built at | 6:06 – 13:45 | 15:46 – 17:40 |
| Adjustment layers | 1 · Gradient Map | 2 · Color Balance, then Curves |
| Palette needed | Yes — five swatches from the reference | No |
| Blend mode | Soft Light | Normal on both layers |
| Layer opacity | 80 % | 100 % on both layers |
| Exported Title | Exported LUT — the default, left alone | New one again |
| Filename | New LUT.cube | New one again.cube |
| Quality | (64 x 64 x 64) | (64 x 64 x 64) |
| Look it produces | Warm, sandy, orange-and-teal — the reference photo’s relationships | Punchier and more contrasted — a straight grade, no borrowed palette |
| Layer | Control | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Color Balance | Tonal Range | Midtones |
| Color Balance | Cyan / Red | 34 % |
| Color Balance | Magenta / Green | 0 % |
| Color Balance | Yellow / Blue | -72 % |
| Color Balance | Preserve Luminosity | Unchecked |
| Color Balance | Opacity / Blend Mode | 100 % / Normal |
| Curves | Channel selectors | RGB · Master |
| Curves | Points added | 3, at the grid intersections |
| Curves | Shape | Shadow point pulled down, midtone lifted — an S-curve |
| Curves | Last coordinate shown | X 0.507 · Y 0.598 |
| Curves | Opacity / Blend Mode | 100 % / Normal |
| Published mark | Published title | What is really there |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 – 1:05 | six marks, through “Shotcut vs Paid Editors” | Correct. Hook, then the standing channel intro. |
| 1:05 | “What a LUT Actually Is” | Wrong. The About Shotcut dialog. A LUT is never defined anywhere in the video. |
| 1:32 | “Why Stealing a Look Works” | Wrong. Loading the preloaded Spain footage. |
| 2:05 | “Tools Needed to Create LUTs” | Wrong here. Preview scaling and proxy. The tools do arrive, at 2:35. |
| 2:45 | “Finding Reference Images or Videos” | Wrong. Downloading Affinity. References arrive at 5:11. |
| 3:20 | “Importing Footage into Shotcut” | Wrong. Footage was imported before the video started. |
| 3:55 | “Preparing Footage for Color Work” | Wrong. Opening the Swatches panel. |
| 4:30 – 5:10 | two marks about matching and fine-tuning | Wrong. The reference photo, then Create Palette From Image. |
| 6:00 | “Exporting Your Custom LUT” | Wrong. The export is at 13:05. |
| 7:20 – 8:50 | four marks about comparisons, mistakes and results | Wrong. All four land inside the gradient map build. |
| 9:30 | “Closing Thoughts” | Wrong, and the worst of them. Eleven minutes of the tutorial are still to come at that mark, including both LUT exports. The real close is at 19:21. |
Is everything really free? Yes, with one asterisk. Shotcut is free and open source. Affinity is free to download and the download page says so in its own subtitle — but installing it ends in a mandatory Canva sign-up, and Ben goes out of his way twice to say a free account is enough and no paid tier is needed. The reference photo came from Pexels, which is free stock. So the headline holds: nothing in this workflow is bought. What the chapter title does not mention is that one of the tools now wants an account before it will open.
What Affinity gives you that Shotcut cannot. The LUT (3D) filter in Shotcut has no strength control — it is on or it is off. That is the whole reason the LUT intensity tutorial exists, and its answer is a four-filter sandwich: Mask: Simple Shape with Operation Overwrite and Shape Rectangle, and Width and Height both at 100.00 %, then Opacity as the intensity dial, then LUT (3D), then Mask: Apply. Order is everything in that build. Authoring your own LUT sidesteps the problem entirely: Opacity at 80 % inside Affinity is the same dial, applied before the file is written. You still need the sandwich for somebody else’s LUT. You do not need it for your own.
Where this sits among the colour tutorials. The colour grading and filmic look pages both document applying a LUT (3D) someone else made, at full strength, with no way to reduce it. The LUT intensity page is the fix for that. This page is the step before all three: where the file comes from in the first place. Across all four the vocabulary is the same — LUT (3D), Open..., Interpolation, Trilinear — because it has not changed in the app between 20.07.11 and 25.10.31. What has changed is everything around it: those earlier pages were recorded on 2020 builds, this one on 25.10.31.
A note on the build number. 25.10.31 is an October 2025 build, and the video went up in January 2026 — so despite being one of the newest tutorials on the channel it is not recorded on the newest Shotcut represented in this collection. The vintage lens tutorial runs on 26.4.30, which is later. If a panel here looks different from the one on your screen, check your own Help → About Shotcut first.
What is deliberately not on this page. The video never opens Affinity’s About dialog, so there is no Affinity version here. It never opens a browser to the reference photo, so there is no link to it. It never shows a folder that Shotcut scans for LUTs, so this page does not claim one exists — Open... is an ordinary file browser and the file can live anywhere. And it never opens the Format dropdown in the export dialog, so .cube is the only LUT format this page can tell you Affinity writes.
Machine transcribed from the video audio. Spoken phrasing is left as it was said; only the product names the transcriber mangled have been corrected — it heard LUT as “let” and “lot” throughout, and Shotcut as “shortcut”. Every timestamp plays the video from that second. Nothing numeric on this page comes from here; all of it was read off the pixels.
Are you tired of paying for LUTs? Or searching the web for free LUTs? Why not make your own?
In this tutorial, I'm not only going to show you how to make your own LUTs,
I'm going to show you how to steal another video or images look and make it into a LUT.
The most important part of this whole thing is everything is free. So let's roll the intro.
I'm just a normal person with no video editing background. I want to start making YouTube videos
and maybe cool transitions and effects. I don't really plan on being a professional video editor,
so I was looking for a free easy-to-learn video editing software. Luckily, I stumbled on Shotcut,
a free open-source video editing program that can do many of the tricks you can do on more
enterprise video editors like Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve, but with a much simpler
and leaner interface, thus dramatically shortening the learning curve. It just takes using your
imagination. So let's learn together. So before I begin, I want to show you what
Shotcut version I'm using, even though it's not going to matter for this tutorial.
But for this tutorial, I'm using Shotcut version 25.10.31.
Okay. So I've already preloaded
some footage. I preloaded a video that I took when I visited Spain. So this is
a beach in Sitches in Spain. And so what I'm going to do is I just want to use a clip
from this video as a reference point. So I just want to make sure that I have the highest
quality. As you can see here, the preview scaling is at 720. So I'm going to go to none.
And then I'm going to go to proxy to make sure that I don't have use proxy as
use proxy as a as a previewer. So I have that. Okay. That's how I can guarantee that I'm having,
I have the highest quality screenshot. All I'm going to do is I'm going to export this
frame. And I'm just going to call this one frame one. I'm going to save that. So now I now have
that on my desktop. So to get started, what you're going to need to do is you're going to need to
download a free photo editing software called Affinity Studio. Luckily, it's just become free
in the last three months. And so all you have to do is go to
www.affinity.studio slash download. And what you're going to do is you're going to need to download
either, you know, whatever version you have, I happen to have windows. So I'm going to download
the windows version. And I have an Intel window. So I'm just going to download the Intel version.
Go through the entire setup. And at the end of it, it's going to ask you to sign up for a Canva
account. And all you have to do is give it a an email address. And it's 100% free. You don't have to
upgrade to the pro version or the premier version or whatever they call it, the paid version of
Canva, just sign up for a free Canva account. And that's going to give you access to the Affinity
software. Then I'm going to go to Affinity, the newly downloaded Affinity program. And I'm just
going to grab that frame. I'm just going to put it in there. I'll stretch it out a little bit.
Actually, I'll go here like this.
Just to kind of fill it as close as possible. I'll just stretch it just so there aren't any white
areas like so. And then I'm going to push it over here because I do want to see some of the people
in there. So now we're in there. You do want to make sure that when you're in Affinity that
you are on the pixel tab instead of the vector. Vector is Affinity's version of Illustrator and
pixel is their version of Photoshop. And we want to be on the Photoshop side.
For this first trick, the most important panel we have to have is the swatches panel. So we
right there. Windows General Swatches. So I'm going to choose swatches just so we have swatches
there. I'm going to dock it over here. So we have swatches there. This is basically all we need.
So for this first tip, rather than building your own
LUT by color editing the photo that we see right now,
what we're going to do is we're going to steal a look. So prior to loading up Affinity,
I downloaded a photo from Pexels.com, which is this one, and it has that classic
orange and teal look. And so what I want to do is I want to steal this look,
and then I apply it to the frame that I have in Affinity Photo. And then once it's applied,
I then want to save it as a LUT. And so then I can use that orange and teal look imported into
Shotcut and then use it on the entire video. So this is the look that we're going to steal,
right? And so I saved this file on my desktop. I just wanted to show you that because this is what
I'm going to use as a reference. So let's go back into Affinity. Again, we've added the swatches
panel here. At the very top right, there's going to be a little arrow. And what we're going to
look for is Create Palette from Image. So we're going to select that. We're going to click Select
Image. And we're going to look for that image that has the orange and teal look that I downloaded,
which is this one. We're going to open it. And then it's going to load up
five colors. You can actually do this with three colors. It's actually easier with three
colors, but I want to make sure that I have the widest range of colors for our orange and teal
LUT. So if you're happy with the five colors, you can then create. Once you click Create,
you can see up here in the swatches panel that there are now five colors.
Okay, so now that we have the five swatch color palette, we're now going to implement the five
swatches and use this color theme and convert this image so that it has that orange and teal look.
So the first thing we're going to need to do is we're going to go back into the layers panel
and with the layers tab selected, we're going to go to adjustments right here with that icon.
We're going to select that and we're going to look for gradient map.
Remember earlier when I said that it would have been easier if we've only chosen
three swatches instead of the five? That's because when you first load the gradient map,
you're going to see three dots on the gradient. And these three dots are equivalent to
the color grading filter in Shotcut where you can make adjustments to the shadows.
For this one, the shadows is represented by the red dot, the mid tones, which is represented by the
green dot, and then the highlights represented by the blue dot. So because we have five swatches
in this, I'm going to make two more dots. So here between the shadows and the mid tones,
I'm going to add another dot right there. And then between the mid tones and the highlights,
I'm going to add another dot. So I'm going to go to the first dot here. And what I'm going to
do here should be the shadows. So I'm going to select that and then it's going to show red right
here. So you click that and a new tab opens, you're going to see a little dropper icon here.
And what you're going to need to do is you're going to need to click and hold click and hold
and then drag that to your swatches. And as you can see, it's going to magnify everything
and I'm going to select the swatch that I think should be the representative color for the shadows,
which is this one here, the dark gray. So I've now reassigned this dot with the dark gray.
Now I'm going to go to this dot here. And I'm going to find the swatch that I think
should be representative of the second darkest of the of the image or the video. So I'm going
to select that again, click and hold the dropper here. And I think the second darkest is this dark
brown. So now I'm going to go to the mid tones, select the green here, drag it over here. Now
this one is going to be a tough one for me because they're different colors. So I don't
know which one is darker. Is this one darker, the dark blue? Or is this one darker?
So I'm going to go on a limb here and I'm going to choose this one here.
So that's my mid tones. And then I'm going to go to the second to the lightest color or what
it's supposed to be the second to the lightest color. I'm going to go click this blue,
click and hold, go over here. And then I think this is going to be the lightest color. And so this
should be the second lightest. Last but not least, I'm going to go to what should be the highlights
here. I'm going to click this blue, click and hold, go over here. And then the lightest color,
the highlights should be this one. And so now I've selected all my colors.
And then we're done. This is your color grade. No, just kidding. This looks terrible.
So the next thing we're going to do just want to make sure that everything is correct. Okay,
the next thing we're going to do is we're going to go to that layer where the gradient map
adjustment is. And instead of normal here, we're going to look for, let's see, darken,
multiply, color burn. We're going to choose
color dodge, screen.
Let's see. That looks interesting. This one here, hard mix, difference, exclusion, subtract, divide.
Let's see.
Maybe we're looking for soft light here. And so I'm just going to toggle the eye,
the eye icon here. So yes, it did apply that classic
orange and teal look. It might be a little too harsh when you use the soft light.
And so what we can do is we can change the opacity because right now it's 100 and this is
zero. So if we want to apply a
kind of a more normal orange and teal look, maybe right there about 80%.
And so we've just applied a new gradient map adjustment to the picture. And so I'm going
to toggle again, and that's what it looks like. So now that we've established what this look
is, right? Now we're going to need to save this look as a LUT. And so it's really easy with Affinity
because all you have to do is go file, export, and then choose LUT. And then quality, I'm just
going to go one YouTuber I saw saved it at about 64, 64, 64. So I'm just going to export it
as that and save it on my desktop. So it's easy to find. I'm going to call this one new
LUT. And I would save it as a cube file. So just leave it as a cube file there.
So we're going to save it. And now our work is done in Affinity. I'm now going to go back to
Shotcut here. So once again, this is the original video, I'm going to go where there's more
people. So it's a lot. So it's not just all ocean.
Let's see if there's another clip. Yep, this is better. Okay, so this is what it originally
looked like. So now while that is selected, I'm going to go to filters, I'm going to click
the plus sign, and I'm going to type LUT, LUT 3d. And then I'm going to open.
And I'm going to go to my desktop, I'm going to look for that new LUT that we just
implemented or we just created open all of a sudden.
This video has a new LUT.
Cool, right? So not only did I just make my own LUT.
But I also was able to steal the look of this picture by basically grabbing the color palette
from this picture and then converting that into a LUT.
And so that's how you steal a look and then make that into a LUT.
So now what you could do is you could look at all these different photos and different
videos online. And if there's a particular director of particular look that you like,
all you have to do is get a screen grab of that, grab the color palette,
put it in Affinity, and then add it to a gradient map and then save it as a LUT.
There you go. That is probably one of the easiest ways to make a LUT.
So another way to do that is instead of using a gradient map,
I'm just going to get rid of this layer here. Again, we have the original video or the original
screen grab from the video. Again, go into the adjustment layer and then choose,
choose another adjustment layer here. I'm just going to go with
let's go with color balance. Okay, so let's go there and then let's kind of drag the color here to
give it a little bit more contrast, a little bit more pop, grab this. Let's keep that the same.
Go here. So let's see what that does. Okay, so it gives it a little bit more pop if I do it
like that. So we've just added a color balance. Let's get another adjustment layer here.
I like curves. So I'm going to add three dots here at the intersections of
these grids. See what's happening there? I'm going to raise this one here and I'm going to
drop this one here. Oops, too much contrast like that. And then I'm going to raise the
midtones a little bit like that. So I've just added two color adjustments there. And once again,
all you have to do is go to file, export, export LUT, name your LUT up here. Again, I
don't know if this is correct. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. I've just seen someone use
64, 64, 64. Name your LUT, let's call this one new, new one again,
export, save it as a cube file. And then now we can go to Shotcut. And instead of the new
LUT that I previously created, use the new one again, open that. And it's now implemented
a brand new LUT that's a little bit more contrasty because that's what I wanted to do in the other
in the frame that I captured. So here's me toggling on and off.
There you go. So you've just learned how to make your own LUT. And I know
my very first video, that's actually what popularized my video is because I was
giving away free LUTs, LUTs that I've created. I actually created those in Photoshop. But now
you have a brand new free option, which is through Affinity. And so if you don't know where
to download it, I'm also going to add the link in the description on how to download it.
Literally, you just need to download it. And then when you install it, it's going to ask you
to create a Canva account, which basically you just signed up with your email address
or use a fake email address. It doesn't matter. Create a Canva account. And then that Canva account
is what you're going to be using to access Affinity. No pun intended. But you know,
most of my tips, I have the affinity for using free software to be able to do the
things that we do in Shotcut. So with that being said, hopefully this video and tutorial
has been useful for you and you get a lot of mileage from the free tools that I've introduced
and the new skills that I've taught you. So once again, thank you for watching.
And I'll talk to you next time. I just want to remind you that if you haven't yet,
go visit my channel. I'm sure you'll find tons of Shotcut related videos.
And don't forget to subscribe so that you know when I drop a new Shotcut related tutorial.
If you ever wondered what I do with these techniques, I actually implement them on my own
videos in my travel and food review channel called Bentacular. Please stop by and visit,
and I would love for you to subscribe as well. Once again, I'll see you next time.
