For years, LUTs were a desktop workflow. You shot your footage, dragged it into Premiere or DaVinci on your computer, loaded your .cube file, and graded from there. If you were shooting on an iPhone, people in the filmmaking community largely dismissed you. That era is over.

Adobe Premiere is now available on iOS — and it supports custom LUT files natively. You can shoot footage on your iPhone, load a .cube LUT, and deliver a professionally color-graded video without ever touching a desktop. We've tested this workflow end-to-end. It works.

What You Need

  • Adobe Premiere — download it from the App Store (may require an Adobe subscription)
  • A .cube LUT file — download it to your iPhone via Files, Dropbox, Google Drive, or AirDrop
  • Any video clip: iPhone footage, or even drone/camera footage imported from cloud storage

That's it. No computer. No desktop software. No conversion step.

How to Apply a LUT in Adobe Premiere for iOS

Adobe calls LUTs "Looks" in the mobile app. The feature is buried slightly but once you find it, it's straightforward.

Step 1 — Open a project and select your clip

Import your video clip into a new project. Tap the clip in the timeline to select it.

Step 2 — Tap the Looks tool

With the clip selected, look at the bottom tool row. Tap Looks. You'll see Adobe's built-in preset options — a small set of styles that are fairly generic. Ignore these.

Step 3 — Tap the + button

In the Looks panel, tap the + icon. This opens a file picker.

Step 4 — Navigate to your .cube file

Browse to wherever your LUT is stored — Files app, Dropbox, iCloud, etc. Select the .cube file.

Step 5 — The LUT is applied

Your LUT loads instantly and is applied to the clip. It also saves into your Looks list, so you don't have to reimport it every time you use it for that project.

That's the full process. Once it's in your Looks list, applying it to future clips is a single tap.

This Works With Apple Log Too

If you're shooting on an iPhone 15 Pro, 16 Pro, or newer in Apple Log, this workflow becomes especially powerful. Apple Log gives you a flat, washed-out starting point — exactly like Sony S-Log or Canon C-Log — that's designed to be graded.

Load a LUT built for Apple Log, and you get genuine cinematic color from a phone with no intermediate steps.

For S-Log footage shot on a Sony camera and transferred to Dropbox, the process is identical: open the clip in Premiere for iOS, apply your LUT under Looks, done. We tested this with footage from a Sony A7S III imported via Dropbox and the LUT applied cleanly.

Why This Matters

The filmmaking community spent years gatekeeping "real" cameras. iPhone shooters were dismissed. That argument is gone now.

With a modern iPhone, Apple Log profile, and a quality LUT:

  • You can shoot and deliver a graded video from your phone in minutes
  • No render farm, no color suite, no computer required
  • The footage latitude in Apple Log is genuinely competitive

Adobe building LUT support into their iOS app signals where the industry is going. Other apps — CapCut, LumaFusion, Blackmagic Camera — are following the same direction. Some call the feature "LUTs," some call it "Looks," some call it "Color Profiles." The mechanism is the same: you load a .cube file, it gets applied.

Getting LUT Files on Your iPhone

You have a few options:

  • AirDrop from a Mac — fastest if you own a desktop
  • Dropbox / Google Drive — upload from any device, open in Files on iOS
  • Direct download — download directly to Safari, save to Files
  • Email — send yourself the .cube file and save the attachment

Once the file is in the iOS Files app, Premiere for iOS can access it through the + import in the Looks panel.

What to Use

Adobe's built-in Looks are basic — think Instagram-filter quality. They're fine for casual edits but they're not the kind of look that makes a video stand out.

If you want the cinematic color that actually turns a mobile video into something that looks like it came out of a production house, you need a proper .cube LUT designed for it.

The Cinema Pack and Travel Pack both ship as standard .cube files — they load directly into Adobe Premiere for iOS with no conversion needed.

The Bigger Picture

The iPhone video market isn't a watered-down version of "real" filmmaking anymore. It's a legitimate delivery format. Creators with 10k+ view averages on their normal uploads are now picking up phones and shooting — not because it's easy, but because the quality barrier is genuinely gone.

A good LUT is one of the fastest ways to separate your iPhone footage from the noise. The color is where the character lives.

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