Packaging LUTs and presets so people can install them without emailing you

A colourist who has refined a look over several years has something genuinely scarce: a tested, coherent set of adjustments that produces a specific result reliably. That is a product, and it required no additional work to create.

What it does require is packaging — and packaging is where most colour products fail. The look is fine; the buyer cannot install it, or installs it and gets something that looks nothing like the preview, and asks for a refund.

The technical work of turning a personal grade into a sellable one is not large, but it is specific, and skipping it is why this category has a reputation for disappointing buyers.

A LUT is a fixed lookup table. It maps input colour to output colour and cannot adapt. It applies anywhere, in any software, and it will look wrong on footage that is not in the colour space it was built for.

A preset is a set of adjustments in a specific application. It carries actual tools — curves, wheels, qualifiers — which means it can be inspected, adjusted and learned from. It only works in that application.

Sell the preset if you can, because it is more useful and more defensible. Sell the LUT if you need to reach people on other software. Selling both, clearly labelled, is common and sensible.

Your working grade contains two things: corrections specific to your shot, and the creative look. Only the second is sellable.

Before packaging, strip everything that responds to the individual clip — exposure, white balance, any tracked window, any qualifier tuned to one face. What remains should be the look alone, and it should be applicable to correctly exposed, correctly balanced footage of any subject.

Test it on material you did not shoot. Footage from a different camera, a different location, a different skin tone. A look that only works on your own footage is a look that will generate refunds, and testing on three unfamiliar clips catches almost all of it.

Ship a folder with an obvious structure and a document that assumes nothing:

LookName/
  01 Install/         instructions, with screenshots
  02 Presets/         the files themselves
  03 LUTs/            the .cube versions
  04 Before-After/    reference stills
  README.pdf

The instructions need the exact menu path, the exact folder location for each platform, and a note that the application must be restarted. Screenshots of each step. This document is boring to write and it is the difference between a product that supports itself and one that consumes your evenings.

Include the before-and-after stills at full resolution. Buyers use them to check that they have installed it correctly, which prevents the most common support message before it is sent.

Nobody wants your look at a hundred percent on every shot. Build it so the intensity is adjustable — as a layer with an opacity control, or as a mix parameter — and say in the instructions where you typically set it.

Naming matters more than it seems. 'Warm 03' tells the buyer nothing. Names that describe the intended use — the kind of footage, the kind of mood, the time of day — mean people reach for the right one and get a good result the first time.

Ship fewer, better-named looks rather than forty variations. A pack of forty is impressive in the listing and paralysing in use, and buyers who cannot choose do not come back.

Anyone can extract a LUT from a graded image approximately. That is worth knowing and not worth worrying about, because approximate is genuinely worse and the people who would do it were not going to buy.

What you can offer that a copy cannot is context: the explanation of what the look is doing, when to use it, how to adapt it, what footage it expects. Package the reasoning alongside the files and you are selling understanding rather than a lookup table.

That is also what makes buyers come back for the next release, which is where the actual business is.