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Free autumn foliage .cube LUT for Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro and CapCut.
Download FREEFall foliage season offers a narrow, genuinely spectacular window each year, and getting the color right in video is trickier than it might seem, cameras often underrepresent the vivid oranges and reds that make peak autumn color so visually striking in person. Autumn Foliage is built to close that gap, pushing warm orange and red tones forward while boosting overall saturation, giving fall content the vibrant, rich color that peak foliage season actually has.
This shares some warmth philosophy with our Desert Golden Dust LUT, but targets a distinctly different color range and seasonal context. For music to pair with fall travel and hiking content, Artlist and Epidemic Sound both carry warm, acoustic tracks well suited to autumn seasonal content.
Format: .cube (33-point 3D LUT), compatible with DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and any other software that supports standard .cube LUT files.
The vivid oranges and reds of peak fall foliage push into a color range that many camera sensors and standard color profiles don't fully capture with the same vibrancy the human eye perceives in person. Part of this comes down to how camera color science handles saturated warm tones generally, often erring on the side of more conservative, less saturated rendering to avoid clipping or unnatural looking results across a broad range of subjects. This conservative approach, while sensible for general use, tends to shortchange fall foliage specifically, which relies on exactly the kind of intense, saturated warm color that standard camera profiles are calibrated to slightly restrain.
Autumn Foliage addresses this directly by specifically boosting saturation in the warm tonal range where fall colors live, rather than applying a uniform saturation boost across the entire color spectrum that might oversaturate skin tones or other unrelated colors in the frame. This targeted approach helps restore the vivid, striking color that peak fall foliage genuinely has, without introducing unnatural results elsewhere in your footage.
The core use case this LUT is built for, content specifically covering peak fall color, scenic drives, and leaf-peeping destinations benefits directly from enhanced warm tone vibrancy.
Hiking and outdoor adventure content filmed during fall season benefits from this LUT's ability to showcase the seasonal color that's often a primary reason for choosing that specific time of year to hike.
Pumpkin patches, apple orchards, and other harvest season content pairs naturally with this LUT's warm, autumnal color enhancement.
Broader autumn lifestyle content, sweater weather, hot beverages, cozy home settings, benefits from this LUT's warm color treatment even outside strictly foliage-focused footage.
Real estate listings photographed or filmed during peak fall season can use this LUT to make surrounding property foliage look its most attractive and seasonally appealing.
Download the .cube file from the link above.
Go to File > Preferences > System > General, then click Open LUT Folder. Copy the downloaded .cube file into this folder.
Resolve needs to be restarted, or the LUT list refreshed manually, before the new LUT appears in your browser.
Right-click your clip's node, choose LUT, and select Autumn Foliage from your custom LUT folder.
Add Lumetri Color to your clip, open the Lumetri panel, go to Creative, click Browse under Look, and select the .cube file directly.
Place the .cube file in your custom LUT folder and apply through the Color inspector.
Fall color typically peaks for a relatively brief window, timing your shoot to coincide with peak color in your specific region gives this LUT the richest possible starting material.
Counterintuitively, overcast lighting often produces more evenly saturated fall color than harsh direct sunlight, which can create blown highlights and deep shadow that compete with the color itself.
If people appear in your footage, confirm the warm color push doesn't push skin tones toward an unwanted orange cast, adjust locally if needed.
Fall color is often most vivid in direct memory, compare your graded footage against your own recollection of how vibrant the scene actually appeared to confirm the grade feels accurate rather than either under or overdone.
Shooting after peak color has passed. Fall color windows are brief and vary by region and year, missing peak timing means working with less vibrant source material this LUT can't fully compensate for.
Overexposing bright, colorful canopy against a dark background. High contrast situations, bright sunlit leaves against deep forest shadow, can be challenging to expose correctly, consider your specific lighting conditions carefully.
Pushing saturation too far and losing believability. While vibrant color is the goal, excessive saturation can look artificial rather than genuinely vivid, moderate this LUT's effect if the result feels overdone for your specific footage.
Ignoring how the warm push affects non-foliage elements. Buildings, clothing, or other warm-toned elements in your frame will also be affected by this LUT's overall warm shift, consider the full frame rather than just the foliage itself.
Learn how to use LUTs on your videos in this beginner guide. LUTs are a great way to enhance your video color grading and take your videos to the next level
Fall foliage color and timing varies considerably based on region, elevation, and the specific tree species present in a given area, and understanding this variation helps set realistic expectations for your specific content plans. Northern and higher elevation regions typically see peak color earlier in the season, sometimes by several weeks compared to southern or lower elevation areas, and the specific mix of tree species in a region determines the dominant color palette, some regions lean heavily toward warm oranges and reds due to maple and oak dominance, while others feature more yellow-dominant color from species like aspen or birch.
This LUT's warm, orange-red emphasis works particularly well for regions and tree species that already lean toward this color range, but creators working in predominantly yellow-foliage regions may want to evaluate whether this specific warm treatment suits their local color palette as well as it would suit a more red and orange dominant landscape. Testing this LUT against footage from your specific regional foliage before committing to it across an entire fall content season helps confirm it's genuinely the right fit for your particular location's characteristic color palette.
Unlike many other landscape and nature content categories that remain relatively consistent throughout much of the year, fall foliage content operates within a genuinely narrow, unpredictable seasonal window that can vary by a week or more from year to year depending on weather conditions throughout the preceding growing season. This creates a specific planning challenge that fall content creators need to account for, building flexibility into a shooting schedule, or even planning multiple potential shoot dates, rather than committing to a single fixed date that might miss peak color entirely if the season runs earlier or later than typical.
Many experienced fall content creators track regional foliage reports, often published by tourism boards or park services for popular leaf-peeping destinations, in the weeks leading up to their planned shoot, adjusting their exact filming dates based on real-time reports of how the season is actually progressing rather than relying purely on historical average timing. This kind of active monitoring and flexible planning considerably increases the odds of capturing genuinely peak color, which this LUT can then enhance to its fullest potential, rather than working with foliage that's either not quite at peak color yet or already past its most vibrant point.
Some of the most visually striking fall content combines colorful foliage with water features, lakes, ponds, or rivers reflecting the surrounding autumn canopy back at the viewer, effectively doubling the visible fall color within a single frame. This LUT's warm enhancement works particularly well applied to these reflective compositions, since the color intensity of both the actual foliage and its watery reflection both benefit from the same targeted saturation boost.
For the strongest reflection shots, calm, still water conditions produce the clearest, most defined reflections, while even light breeze can break up a reflection into a more impressionistic, less literal pattern. Both approaches have creative merit depending on the specific mood you're trying to achieve, a perfectly still, mirror-like reflection creates a calm, almost meditative quality, while a slightly disturbed reflection can add a sense of movement and life to an otherwise static landscape composition.
While peak fall foliage represents a narrow seasonal window, thoughtful content planning can extend the useful life of footage captured during this period considerably. Many successful travel and nature content creators shoot extensively during a brief fall color window specifically to build a library of footage that gets used and repurposed across multiple pieces of content throughout the following months, rather than treating each piece of fall footage as a one-time-use asset tied strictly to autumn publishing.
This approach makes particular sense given how narrow and unpredictable the actual peak color window tends to be in any given year, the effort and travel required to capture genuinely excellent fall foliage footage often justifies building a more extensive library during that brief window than any single piece of content would require, with this LUT applied consistently across the full library ensuring a cohesive look regardless of which specific clips end up used in which future pieces of content.
Organizing this footage library by location, tree species, or specific visual characteristics as you capture it, rather than leaving it as an undifferentiated folder of clips, makes it considerably easier to locate the right footage when planning future content months after the actual fall shooting season has passed and the specific details of individual clips may no longer be fresh in memory.
This kind of systematic organization also makes it easier to identify genuine gaps in your existing footage library, perhaps you have strong wide landscape shots but lack close-up detail footage of individual leaves or branches, prompting a more targeted, efficient shooting plan for the following year's fall season rather than simply repeating whatever approach happened to work the previous year without a clear sense of what additional footage types might actually round out your library more effectively, ultimately building a genuinely comprehensive and versatile fall content resource over time.
A well organized, consistently graded fall footage library, built up over multiple seasons using this same LUT as a consistent foundation, becomes an increasingly valuable creative asset the longer it's maintained, giving you reliable, high quality b-roll and establishing shots ready to drop into future projects without needing to wait for the next fall season to roll around.
It works best on orange and red dominant foliage, regions with primarily yellow foliage may want to test and potentially adjust this LUT's specific color emphasis.
It can enhance whatever color is present, but can't manufacture vibrancy that simply isn't in the source footage if shot well past or before peak timing.
Yes, since it applies an overall warm push, check representative footage with people in frame and adjust locally if the warmth feels excessive on skin.
Yes, free for both personal and commercial autumn and fall seasonal content production.
Overcast conditions often produce more evenly saturated color without the contrast challenges direct sunlight introduces, though both can work well with appropriate exposure management.
Yes, its warm color treatment suits broader autumn and harvest season content beyond strictly foliage-focused footage.
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