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Tosha187
Participant
August 30, 2023
Open for Voting

P: loading and browsing LUT's directly from the Lightroom creative profile browser?

  • August 30, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 256 views

Why isn't there an easy way to load LUT's into the Lightroom profile browser?

 

there are the four categories of "creative profiles" (Artistic, modern vintage, black and white), a third of them are usable but they are not nearly enough. at the end of the day i use about 4 of them on most of my work (V4 V6 A7), which makes it look boringly similar and also doesnt work for nearly all situatons. 

the rest i find are extremenly disruptive to skintones and make people look unnaturaly orange.

 

these are Extremely powerfull tools in shaping the overall mood and feel of a photo, especially when it comes to colour rendition, styling and mood. despite that this feature hasnt ever been updated since it appeared sometime long ago around lightroom 6-ish ...

 

and yes i've read into it and i know that you have to go through camera RAW and load LUT files manually one by one, but even there it's a guessing game since only when you loaded you can even see what it does and even then it doesn't always work.

which begs the question:

 

Why isn't there an easy way to load LUT's into the Lightroom profile browser ?

select a folder, flip through the lut files with a preview of their effects, and choose which ones to import.

 

i guess one can only dream...

 

    2 replies

    johnrellis
    johnrellis
    Legend
    August 31, 2023

    This feature request should not be merged into the old feature request.

     

    Nine years ago, there was a popular feature request to support the use of LUTs in LR:

    https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-ideas/p-ability-to-use-3d-luts/idi-p/12248993

     

    Adobe considered the introduction of "creative profiles" to adequately satisfy that feature request and marked it as "released". 

     

    But for many, if not most, people voting for that feature request, what they meant was the easy ability to use the thousands of 3D LUTs that are available for video editing.  As you've observed, it's not that easy to use such LUTs in LR:

     

    1. You first have to convert each one at a time to a creative profile in Camera Raw, a tedious process.

     

    2. Adobe inexplicably omitted the color space Rec 709, in which almost all of those video LUTs are defined,

    https://community.adobe.com/t5/camera-raw-ideas/p-add-rec-709-to-lut-color-spaces-in-new-enhanced-profiles/idi-p/12221136

     

    The omission is a clear indicator that Adobe had a much different use-case in mind when they defined creative profiles. When people make creative profiles using those video LUTs, they typically will select color space sRGB, and the resulting profile won't produce the same colors as the original LUT, since sRGB is similar but not identical to Rec 709.

      JohanElzenga
      Community Expert
      JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      August 31, 2023

      LUTs are not profiles, that is why. You can create your own profiles (you have to do that in Camera Raw) that contain a LUT, but that does not mean that a LUT and a profile are the same thing.

       

      -- Johan W. Elzenga
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