I read about LUT’s in PL7 and the idiosyncrasies with custom presets and storing them. What I want to know is what is special about LUT’s that can be used in PL8? I don’t know much about them, but some that work fine, relatively simple ones, in Affinity Photo don’t work in PL8. They are a few years old. It is suggested by PL8 that they are “ill-formed.” I can export a LUT from Affinity Photo and use it in PL8, FWIW.
you want your luts in .cube format to work with AP and PL. LUTs are like colour grading presets, they replace RGB value by another one, usually they don’t affect skin tone because they’re use for movie/video.
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That’s where I’m stuck. I have .cube LUT’s that work in other software but not PL8. It’s just for the purpose of creating a normalized tone curve the easy way. I could do it manually starting from a standard curve and adjust it by eye, which is honestly probably good enough for my eyes, and the tone curve in PL8 is very robust, suitable for that. Or I can edit in PL8 and apply a custom curve in Affinity before printing.
Can you post a sample problematic .cube header?
Maybe it’s 1D LUT?
Never tried if 1D cube LUTs work with PL8, since I use ToneCurve presets for the purpose.
In PL8 I have no problem using LUTs from ‘Top 9 LUT Pack’ by Ivan Weiss from Affinity site. These were 3D .cube LUTs. Here’s a sample header:
#Created by: Affinity Photo (Serif Europe Ltd.)
TITLE "Exported LUT"
#LUT size
LUT_3D_SIZE 64
#data domain
DOMAIN_MIN 0.0 0.0 0.0
DOMAIN_MAX 1.0 1.0 1.0
#LUT data points
... data points follow ...
Off-topic blah, blah:
LUTs often don’t play well with other corrections (like contrast, WB), so I prefer to use AP-specific edits instead. Same in PL. They are often too image-specific. Looks silly, but .cube LUTs don’t specify the expected color space (LUTs supplied in PL8 were made for Wide Gamut, I guess, but for user installed LUTs you have to choose the color space from the drop-down list, with sRGB as default). This cube LUT file format was specified by Adobe but there are also some other “cube” (and “non-cube”) LUT formats, to make it even a bigger mess. I think cine people have more expertise on LUTs (daVinci Resolve, hardware LUTs).
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I would say it’s the opposite too often 
You can see many deep-orange faces with everything else black or rotten green, to mention one style. They use it to keep the consistent mood across different lighting conditions. They often don’t care about posterization either, because 99% of the public will not notice it… Movies are more tolerant than photos in this respect.
I use LUTs very rarely. In one case, the stage lighting was so crazy, that I had to use the PL8 ‘02-Bleach-bypass’ LUT together with some other edits to save some digestible colors.
A download link and contents of the LUT are shown. It is 1D. DxO docs do not specify that 1D is not allowed, and I could not find out elsewhere, just kept getting referred back to DxO docs. The best thing, I think is to put this into Affinity, export a new .cube that I know will work in PL8 and measure the results somehow.
http://www.easydigitalnegatives.com/files/Standard_Cyanotype_Affinity_LUT.cube
#Created by: Easy Digital Negatives
TITLE “Easy Digital Negatives”
LUT_1D_SIZE 21
DOMAIN_MIN 0.0 0.0 0.0
DOMAIN_MAX 1.0 1.0 1.0
#LUT data points
0.007843 0.007843 0.007843
0.296154 0.296154 0.296154
0.403846 0.403846 0.403846
0.457895 0.457895 0.457895
0.486275 0.486275 0.486275
0.507813 0.507813 0.507813
0.529870 0.529870 0.529870
0.550562 0.550562 0.550562
0.564706 0.564706 0.564706
0.577174 0.577174 0.577174
0.589844 0.589844 0.589844
0.605000 0.605000 0.605000
0.615686 0.615686 0.615686
0.626506 0.626506 0.626506
0.637430 0.637430 0.637430
0.651832 0.651832 0.651832
0.662745 0.662745 0.662745
0.673733 0.673733 0.673733
0.692609 0.692609 0.692609
0.718388 0.718388 0.718388
1.000000 1.000000 1.000000
#END data
#approx. Dmax(Lab): 5.000
PFA two versions of ToneCurve presets derived from your LUT (Luma/RGB versions). Unfortunately I was lazy with the AWK command, so both are “partial presets”, hence other ToneCurves may intefere – reset TC before applying and don’t hover over other curves afterwards (if you have PL8.0, the “TC preset hovering bug” was fixed later). I may convert them to “full presets” tomorrow. Hopefully no bugs.
Standard_Cyanotype_Affinity_LUT_Luma.preset (795 Bytes)
Standard_Cyanotype_Affinity_LUT_RGB.preset (788 Bytes)
EDIT: Since you are on Windows, you may just copy the presets to “C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\AppData\Local\DxO\DxO PhotoLab 8\ToneCurves”, (or “%LOCALAPPDATA%\DxO\DxO PhotoLab 8\ToneCurves”).
Thank you for your effort, @Wlodek . It was not at all necessary. It’s quite a bit different from the other standard curve I entered by hand, but it’s explained by the sources of the curves. Peter Mrhar and Christina Anderson are both knowledgeable alternative print makers, but they obviously have different goals while producing their negative. Mrhar’s methods are universal using digital soft proofs while Anderson’s are paper and printer specific. One emphasizes shadows in prints while the other highlights, a decision you have to make with a compressed dynamic range. It should be fun to figure out the best way to do it.
ya that’s like people saying HDR look so great over done 
i do have friends working in video and movie industry and mostly use LUTs that don’t affect skin tone. even my youngest have only LUTs that don’t affect skin tone and work for tv. i wish i could see shrek telling the 6pm news one day!
most application support .cube while less for .3DL format.
the thing with PL is that there is no colour grading tool, so trying to work with LUTs when you have no clue and or experience with LUTs, is like a kid learning HDR back a decade ago when people said it look so great.
don’t start with “I can do the same with tone curve”. I’d say you can chew tide pods to clean and whiten your teeth =]
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