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Managing LUTs & profiles

PxlMonk keeps your LUTs and camera profiles in central libraries so they’re available on every photo. You manage each from its own dialog, opened from the Develop panel.

Click Manage LUTs next to the LUT picker to open the library.

The LUT library: categories on the left, LUTs on the right

Photos reference a LUT by a stable id, so renaming, moving or regrouping a LUT here never breaks the look of a photo that already uses it.

The left column groups your LUTs. Add a category with +, rename or delete it via double-click or the right-click menu. The entry is the ungrouped root; it can’t be renamed or removed.

Click Import… and choose a file. PxlMonk accepts .cube, .3dl and Hald-CLUT .png files and converts them all to its canonical .cube format. The import lands in the selected category.

LUTs are read as being built for sRGB / Rec.709, which is what creative LUTs are made for almost without exception. Your photo is put into that space, run through the LUT and brought back, so a LUT gives you the look it was designed to give. A photo can hold colours more vivid than sRGB can describe — a deep sunset red, a saturated flower — and those come back very slightly less vivid, because the LUT has nothing to say about a colour it was never shown. This is beyond what an ordinary screen displays, so you will rarely see it.

Drag a LUT to reorder it within a category, or drop it onto a category to move it. Rename a LUT from its right-click menu.

Click Manage camera profiles next to the camera-profile picker to open the library.

The camera-profile library with imported DCP profiles

Click Load… and choose a .dcp file. It’s added to the central library and becomes available for every image. Only profiles that carry an actual look (hue/saturation and look tables) are accepted — matrix-only profiles are rejected.

Rename or remove profiles from the right-click menu. Once imported, a profile appears in the Develop Camera profile dropdown (alongside None and the image’s Embedded profile), where you apply it and set its strength.