I’ve been playing around with Claud code to help me find a solution to this for Mac. Someone seems to have already figured out how to do that on windows:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FINUK4O_Dpg
If someone knows a way to do this pleas let me know.
The AI recap of what I did to try and solve this:
Has anyone managed to add custom LUT sections in DxO PhotoLab 9 on macOS?
On Windows it’s straightforward — you add a subfolder containing your .cube files plus a corresponding JSON file to the LUT directory at C:\Program Files\DxO\DxO PhotoLab\Lut, and the new section appears in the Type dropdown in the LUT Grading palette. There’s a YouTube tutorial showing this working on Windows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FINUK4O_Dpg
On macOS the equivalent LUT folder is inside the app bundle at:
/Applications/DXOPhotoLab9.app/Contents/Resources/LUT/
I’ve already successfully modified Premium.json to add my own LUTs, so I fully understand the JSON structure. It looks like this:
{
“Version”: 1,
“Content”: {
“DisplayName”: {
“en”: “My Custom Section”
},
“ColorSpace”: “ProPhotoRGB”,
“Files”: [
“MyLUT01.cube”,
“MyLUT02.cube”
]
}
}
The problem is that when I add a brand new JSON file to that folder — with the exact same structure as Premium.json and Standard.json — PhotoLab completely ignores it. Only Standard and Premium ever appear in the Type dropdown no matter what I try.
I have around 10 sets of custom LUTs (~100 files each) that I need to organise into separate named sections. Putting everything into Premium.json isn’t workable at that scale.
Things I’ve already tried:
- Adding a new JSON file to the main LUT folder with bare filenames (e.g. “MyLUT.cube”)
- Adding a new JSON file to the main LUT folder with subfolder path prefixes (e.g. “MyFolder/MyLUT.cube”)
- Placing the JSON file inside the subfolder itself alongside the .cube files
- Checking and matching file permissions and ownership to Premium.json and Standard.json
- Verifying the JSON is valid and correctly formatted
- Launching the app from outside /Applications to try to bypass SIP restrictions
- Confirmed the ColorSpace value “ProPhotoRGB” works correctly (already using it in Premium.json)
- Searched for any user-accessible LUT folder outside the app bundle in ~/Library/Application Support/DxO Labs/ — nothing relevant found
- Used strings to inspect LUT.bundle and found references to LUTPackage and LUTPackageCategory classes, and pathsForResourcesOfType:inDirectory: suggesting it scans for JSON files dynamically — but it still won’t pick up new ones
None of it has worked. My current theory is that DxO on Mac only loads JSON files that were present at install time, or that it only scans a specific hardcoded set of filenames. But I can’t confirm this since even sudo can’t modify the existing files inside the app bundle.
Has anyone actually got this working on Mac? Is there a user-accessible folder outside the app bundle that DxO scans for custom LUT sections that I might have missed? Would really appreciate any help — this seems like something that should be straightforward given it works fine on Windows.