LAM Guides · Colour grading & desktop
.cube is the industry-standard LUT (colour lookup table) format,
readable by most professional editing software. LAM can export any look — including one you've
tuned yourself — to a .cube file, meaning the colour you see on your phone can move
straight to your desktop and get applied to footage shot on a different camera.
A LUT is essentially a lookup table: for every input colour value, it returns a corresponding
output colour. "17³" is that table's sampling grid size across the three colour channels (red,
green, blue) — detailed enough to interpolate smoothly for most real footage, and the most common
size professional editing software expects when reading a .cube file.
The exported LUT samples the same colour math the app runs, on a 17³ grid. So the colour you apply on desktop matches what you saw on your phone, instead of drifting because two separate colour systems computed it differently. It carries colour only: grain, halation and skin correction cannot live in a LUT.
A LUT can only encode colour-to-colour effects (pure colour grade). Effects that depend on position within the frame — grain, halation, vignette, region-specific skin tone — fall outside what a colour-to-colour LUT can carry, because a LUT has no idea where a pixel sits in the frame, only what colour value it holds. In other words: the exported LUT faithfully reproduces the look's colour, but not its grain or halation — recreating those two layers on desktop, if you want them, needs your editing software's own tools.
Most useful when a project mixes footage from several devices (phone + a separate camera + drone) and you want everything to match colour — export the LUT from LAM once, apply it across the whole set. If you're only shooting and exporting straight out of LAM, you don't need this step at all — the colour is already applied on-device, with nothing waiting for post.