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bjtmiguel
Participating Frequently
December 20, 2020
Question

Cycling through Luts in Photoshop

  • December 20, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 1202 views

Just starting to use Luts in photoshop, is there anyway of cycling through them with the up/down keyboard

functions instead of viewing them labourisly one at a time.

I could convert them for ACR but I would like to keep the option of using Blend modes in photoshop.

A freiend of mine can cycle through them in Windows, surely I can do the same on my Mac in Catalina

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3 replies

Conrad_C
Community Expert
Conrad_CCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 21, 2022
@bjtmiguel wrote:

A freiend of mine can cycle through them in Windows, surely I can do the same on my Mac in Catalina

 

No, that is not a given. The reason is that Windows is designed for much more keyboard control over options, so when you open a drop-down list in Windows, the currently selected item is both selected and applied as you change it with the arrow keys.

 

macOS is more of a mouse-first design. Although you can use the Enable Full Keyboard Access option to select panel items and options, including items in drop-down lists, unfortunately that does not make a drop-down list work completely like Windows: On the Mac, a selected list item is not applied until the list is closed. This limitation of macOS is why you can’t use the arrow keys to try out list items.

 

This macOS limitation affects all Mac applications, so it affects all drop-down menus in Mac Photoshop except one: The blending modes drop-down list in the Layers panel. That is the only drop-down list in all of Mac Photoshop (that I know of) that will let you preview the effect before applying. Adobe only made that possible recently, because it was such a highly demanded feature request. But to accomplish it, Adobe basically had to hack around the way macOS works naturally.

 

So to get a more interactive LUT preview, Adobe will have to do one of two things:

 

A) Hack around the Mac system, like they did for the blending mode list in the Layers panel. The disadvantage is that this is non-standard in macOS and could break if Apple changes something in a future system update.

 

B) Redesign how LUTs are applied so it can be more naturally interactive on both macOS and Windows, like the way Adobe lets you try LUTs in Camera Raw and Lightroom by hovering over LUT thumbnail previews.

 

If you have a strong feeling which way it should go, you can create a feature request in the Ideas section of this forum, or look there to see if someone already created a request you can upvote.

M
maximea99886506
Participating Frequently
February 22, 2022

Thanks Conrad for all this information

I was thinking to use a PC keyboard with PC shortcut exported but it seems that its will be inefective.. what do you think about use photoshop with a Windows emulator like VMware Fusion ? I am curious

Conrad_C
Community Expert
Conrad_CCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 23, 2022

As long as you have an Intel Mac and not Apple Silicon, it should work to run Windows Photoshop in a virtual machine on your Mac. Of course you will need to install and sign into the Creative Cloud application in Windows so that you can install Windows versions of Adobe software.

 

But it might not work completely. Virtual machines typically do not have full access to the graphics hardware, so they substitute an “imitation” GPU for Windows to see. The current version of Photoshop relies on more graphics processing than it has in the past, so it is pickier about the GPU. Depending on the virtualizer application you use, Photoshop sometimes decides that the virtual machine GPU is not up to its standards, so some features may not be available. At least that’s been my experience with the Parallels Desktop virtualizer.

 

But if you already have VMWare Fusion, it’s worth trying.

M
maximea99886506
Participating Frequently
February 21, 2022

hey same problem here

cycling through LUT working on windows but not on Mac apparently

Just Shoot Me
Just Shoot Me
Legend
December 20, 2020

Your post was moved over from the "Using the Community" forum, which is for getting help using this forum system, to a better forum.


I hope this helps. Best of luck to you.

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