Getting Started With LUMIX LUTs
This year (2025) I was asked by the team at LUMIX Australia to create a tutorial with the aim of helping new LUMIX users learn to how load LUTs into their camera. Check out the final video below to see the results or read on in this post to find out more about loading and shooting with LUMIX LUTs…
Shoot Edit Share
Over the last few years I have become obsessed with finding a camera that I can carry with me everywhere, that is awesome quality and takes great looking photographs straight out of the camera.
As a professional photographer I actually love editing photographs when it’s for work, but when I’m out and about taking photographs of my everyday life I just want to shoot and share and not have to sit behind my computer for hours on end tweaking sliders in my editing software.
That’s why I’ve found LUMIX cameras perfect for me, not only is the quality amazing but I can easily choose and transfer a LUT from the LUMIX Lab App into my camera and shoot away without the need for editing… and you can too! It’s super easy!
What Is A LUT and Where Can I Find Them?
If you’re unfamiliar with the term LUT, basically it stands for ‘LOOK UP TABLE’. I like to think of them as filters or looks or presets… but they are actually way smarter. When you take a photograph with Real Time LUT, the look is applied to the image before it’s saved rather than after, meaning the full quality of your photograph is preserved. Super smart!
Check out all of my LUTs here…
LUMIX also have a free app called the LUMIX Lab App and it is filled to the brim with class LUTs ready to be transferred to your camera.
Loading LUTs With LUMIX Lab App (Step By Step)
Step 01
Download the LUMIX Lab App
Step 02
Once you’ve downloaded the LUMIX Lab App, head to the Download tab. Here you can scroll through all of the LUTs on the app. You can preview the LUTs with the example images or even upload your own example image if you like. Once you find one you like the look of, go ahead and choose ‘Download’.
Step 03
The next thing to do is transfer the LUT to your camera. Follow the simple instructions to pair your camera to the app, and once connected you can move across to the LUT tab in the app where you will find all of your downloaded LUTs. Choose a LUT and select Transfer To Camera, pick a slot for it, hit LUT Transfer and that’s your LUT transferred to your camera.
My camera has room for something like 39 LUTs at any one time. That’s loads!
Step 04
You’re done with the app, so now let’s get our camera ready to shoot with our LUT. If you’re using the LUMIX S9 your camera will have a dedicated LUT button so you can hit that, Real Time LUT opens, you can select your LUT and start shooting straight away!
Not every LUMIX camera has a dedicated LUT button though so another way to get set up is to go to the very top of your camera’s menu, find Photo Style. Select this and navigate across to REAL TIME LUT.
With REAL TIME LUT selected, move down and the first option is where you’re going to add your downloaded LUT. Once selected, you can move down the options below to tweak the LUT to suit your shooting style.
Initially when shooting with LUTs I leave the LUT Opacity, Contrast, Highlight, Shadow, Saturation, and Hue on 0. I change my Grain Effect to Low, turn Color Noise off and turn the Sharpness and Noise Reduction all the way down to -5. These few initial tweaks are what I’ve found give me the most ‘film-like’ looking images to begin with.
Step 05
Once you have your LUT loaded and your settings how you like them, you can hit the Display button to save your look into one of the My Photo Style slots.
If I were to give one little top tip it would be to take few example images with the LUT loaded and if the look it gives is a little strong. You can turn down the LUT Opacity to say 80/90% instead of the full 100%. This is a really cool feature with the LUMIX cameras and one that a lot of people overlook I think.
Check out this video I made featuring my ‘Lake’ LUTs for some inspiration of what you can achieve with LUTs.
Conclusion
This way of shooting really is the easiest, fastest, most creative and most fun way to get great looking images, straight out of the camera. Personally I bring my little S9 with me everywhere, and at any one time I have around 3 LUTs loaded, ready to shoot with.
As I am a professional photographer, I always choose to shoot RAW images as well as JPEGs with LUTs, but most of the time the RAW files I shoot just get transferred to my computer as backups and I find myself sharing the JPEGs straight from the camera.
If you haven’t tried shooting LUTs with a LUMIX camera yet, I couldn’t recommend it enough. It’s just about as much fun as you can have with photography. By skipping the editing process, my LUT loaded LUMIX camera saves me so much time and energy, which can be put back into shooting and capturing more of my life and the people around me.
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