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Free golden hour and warm sunset .cube LUT for Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro and CapCut.
Download FREEDownload a free golden hour and warm sunset .cube LUT built to enhance warm sunlight tones for travel vloggers, wedding filmmakers, and outdoor content creators, and apply it in Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro or CapCut as an adjustment layer or node on top of your footage.
Spec Detail Quantity1 LUT (.CUBE file)Compatible SoftwareAdobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, CapCut, PhotoshopSupported Color SpacesRec.709 (primary), Sony S-Log2/3, Canon Log, Blackmagic Gen 5File Format.CUBE (3D LUT, 33x33x33)Color Profile StyleWarm amber highlights, soft glow, golden midtones, gentle contrast liftBest Used ForTravel vlogs, wedding films, outdoor lifestyle content, sunset and beach footageLicense TierFree Personal & Commercial Use
Golden hour is one of the most heavily searched terms in video editing, and for good reason. The warm, low-angle light of the hour after sunrise or before sunset is deeply tied to positive emotional associations, romance, nostalgia, comfort, and it flatters skin tones better than almost any other lighting condition. This LUT pushes footage toward that same warm, glowing quality even when the original light was flatter or more neutral, lifting amber tones into the highlights and adding a gentle overall glow without crushing detail in the shadows.
It works particularly well on travel and outdoor footage because it reinforces exactly the mood that kind of content is usually trying to sell, a sense of warmth, adventure, and a beautiful moment in time. For wedding filmmakers, the same warmth reads as romance and celebration rather than a flat, clinical record of the day. For real estate and property walkthroughs shot near sunset, the same grade can make an exterior shot feel considerably more inviting than the same footage graded neutrally. A second reason this warm-only approach travels so well across formats is that it survives compression better than more extreme grades. Platforms like Instagram and YouTube apply fairly aggressive video compression on upload, and grades with very deep shadow crushing or extreme saturation shifts can develop visible banding or color blocking once compressed. A gentler, warmth-focused push like this one tends to hold up more cleanly through that compression process, which matters for creators publishing primarily to social platforms rather than delivering a final master file.
Unlike a full teal-and-orange complementary grade, this LUT does not push shadows cool. It leans warm across the entire tonal range, which keeps the result feeling like enhanced natural light rather than an obviously stylized cinematic treatment. That subtlety is part of why it performs well across such a wide range of content types, from personal vlogs to client wedding films, without looking like a heavy-handed filter.
This .CUBE file works natively across Adobe Premiere Pro (Lumetri Color), DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro (FCPX), and CapCut Desktop.
One practical tip specific to this look: since the grade pushes warmth without a cool counterbalance, skin tones in close-up shots can drift slightly orange at full strength. Start around 70 percent intensity on any footage with faces in frame and increase from there only if the shot calls for it. On wide landscape or establishing shots without close-up faces, pushing closer to full strength usually reads as intentional rather than overdone.
This LUT performs best on footage that already has some warm, directional light to work with rather than flat, overcast conditions. Shooting during the actual golden hour, roughly the hour after sunrise or before sunset, gives genuine warm, low-angle light for the grade to enhance rather than manufacture from nothing. Backlighting a subject during this window, with the sun behind them and the camera facing toward it, produces the soft rim light and haze that this LUT is built to amplify.
If golden hour shooting is not practical for a given project, a warm-toned LED panel or a simple reflector bounced with warm gel can approximate some of the same quality indoors or in flat outdoor light, giving this LUT more to work with than fully neutral daylight would.
Artlist has an extensive library of golden-hour travel and lifestyle stock footage that pairs naturally with this grade if you need supplementary b-roll. For music, warm acoustic and lo-fi tracks from Epidemic Sound suit this aesthetic particularly well, and Motion Array carries travel and lifestyle title templates that complement this warm tone well.
Watch on YouTube: Golden Hour Look Color Grading in Premiere Pro
Lens flare and light leak overlays complement this LUT particularly well, reinforcing the same warm, hazy quality the grade is going for on its own. For travel and lifestyle edits, a slideshow-style title template gives this warm look a polished frame without fighting the color treatment.
This LUT is built as a creative grade for standard Rec.709 footage, not as a technical conversion tool. If shooting on a camera set to Sony S-Log2/3, Canon Log, or Blackmagic Gen 5, the footage needs a technical LUT applied first to bring it into a normal Rec.709 viewing space before this warm creative grade goes on top. Applying a creative-only LUT directly to unconverted log footage typically produces washed out, low-contrast results, since log footage is deliberately flat and desaturated to preserve dynamic range for later grading, and this LUT is not designed to perform that first conversion step itself.
Most camera manufacturers provide free technical conversion LUTs for their specific log profiles on their support websites. Once that conversion is applied as a first step, either on its own node or adjustment layer beneath this one, the Golden Hour and Warm Sunset LUT will behave exactly as expected on footage originally shot in any of the supported log formats.
Consider a wedding videographer covering an outdoor ceremony that runs through the late afternoon into early evening. Footage shot earlier in the day, under harsher overhead light, generally needs a lighter touch with this LUT, closer to 50 to 60 percent opacity, since the underlying light is already fairly neutral or slightly cool. As the ceremony moves into the true golden hour window, the same LUT can be pushed toward 90 to 100 percent, since the natural light is already doing most of the work and the grade is reinforcing rather than manufacturing the mood. Editing the whole sequence with this LUT at a single fixed intensity across every clip usually looks inconsistent for exactly this reason, the underlying light changes meaningfully across even a single afternoon shoot.
The most frequent issue with warm-only grades like this one is applying the same fixed intensity across an entire project regardless of how the underlying footage was lit, which tends to look inconsistent once cut together. Adjusting opacity clip by clip based on the actual light in each shot, rather than setting one value and leaving it, produces a far more cohesive final edit. A second common mistake is stacking this LUT with an unrelated color grade that also pushes warmth, such as a separate teal-and-orange treatment, which tends to oversaturate skin tones well past a natural result. If combining with another grade, reduce the opacity of at least one of the two significantly rather than running both at full strength.
This LUT is free for personal and commercial use. No attribution is required. It should not be resold or redistributed as a standalone stock asset, and it should not be uploaded to a competing stock photography or LUT marketplace. Full terms are covered in the Terms of Service.
Will this LUT work on footage not shot during golden hour?
Yes, though footage with genuinely warm ambient light to begin with will respond more naturally. Footage shot in cool, overcast, or fluorescent lighting may need a stronger intensity setting to achieve the same effect.
Is this LUT free for commercial projects?
Yes, this LUT is free for both personal and commercial use with no attribution required.
Which software works best with this LUT?
It is a standard .CUBE file, so it works identically across Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro and CapCut Desktop.
Why do skin tones look slightly orange at full strength?
Since this is a warm-only grade with no cool counterbalance, true skin tone can shift warm at 100 percent intensity. Lower the opacity or mix to 70 to 80 percent on footage with close-up faces.
Download free video templates, LUTs, and presets for Premiere Pro, After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, CapCut, and Final Cut Pro.
