Night Vision LUTs

Posted on June 5, 2022

During the production of "Death Train" I came up with this idea of a shot where we transition from darkness to night vision view along with the protagonist.

Since I mostly work with lookup tables (LUTs) when it comes to color grading, I decided to see if there are any free/cheap packs out there that I could use for this scene. Sadly, I only found some low quality filters and overpriced packs full of junk. So I decided to make my own LUTs I could use not only in this particular cinematic, but also in future productions. After several hours of experimentation and tweaking, I made a couple of cool looking presets and chose the one that best suited this sequence.

Now here's the most important part: I'm releasing these night vision LUTs under CC0 1.0 Universal license for everyone to use. This pack contains 8 presets, each in .3dl, .cube, and .look formats (33x33x33 resolution), ranging from modern looking to classic "bright green" ones.

Download from Google Drive (.zip)
Download from Dropbox (.zip)

But wait, there's more! Here are the same LUTs adapted for use in Source 2 Filmmaker postprocessing editor and Unreal Engine.

Source 2 Filmmaker: Google Drive (.zip) | Dropbox (.zip)
Unreal Engine: Google Drive (.zip) | Dropbox (.zip)

Hopefully you'll find these LUTs useful!

P.S. Remember: simply dropping a LUT and calling it a day isn't always enough. Additional color correction may be required!