A better way to manage LUT in Affinity Photo

[25fps]

I love Affinity Photo, but I've long wished I could have the ability to load multiple LUTs simultaneously and preview a photo with multiple LUTs applied, so I could choose from them, like other developers' apps offer. Will we ever have this option?

[Hangman]

Hi @25fps and welcome to the forums,

You can already do this by going to the Adjustment panel (Window → Adjustment) and from the LUT section, click the cog icon and then select Import LUTs...

[Komatös]

Hello @25fps and welcome to the forums.

I don't understand the question right now.
If you have the Studio Panel Adjustement open, you will find the drop-down item LUTs there. There you can create your own categories and then fill them with multiple selected lut files.
The only thing that is not available is the preview of several LUT variants at the same time.

[NotMyFault]

36 minutes ago, Komatös said:

Hello @25fps and welcome to the forums.

I don't understand the question right now.
If you have the Studio Panel Adjustement open, you will find the drop-down item LUTs there. There you can create your own categories and then fill them with multiple selected lut files.
The only thing that is not available is the preview of several LUT variants at the same time.

I think this is the core of the request. get a preview of all LUTs under adjustments, like it is already the case for all other adjustment categories, except LUTs.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, NotMyFault said:

I think this is the core of the request. get a preview of all LUTs under adjustments, like it is already the case for all other adjustment categories, except LUTs.

Yes, that seems to be what @25fps wants (and perhaps they will confirm).

The Adjustments panel used to provide exactly that for LUTs, but the preview function was removed in 1.9 because it was causing severe performance issues when users had hundreds or thousands of LUTs added to the application. In that situation, which seems common, opening the LUTs category in the Adjustments panel required that Photo generate all the preview images, which took an excessive amount of time.

So, to "fix" that performance problem, the Developers removed the preview capability.

[NotMyFault]

Great to get your refresh about the history. The LUT panel allows to create categories. Only one category is shown at a time, and the panel size naturally limits the visible LUTs to about 15. it seems there is no real technical limit, but lack of Affinity resources to implement LUT preview efficiently based on visible thumbnails.

[matisso]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

So, to "fix" that performance problem, the Developers removed the preview capability.

“Fix” is a good euphemism – without beating around the bush, it’s a downgrade.

In case there’s a ton of LUTs loaded, you could paginate these previews (primitive but works) or implement some sort of delayed lazy load. Simple solutions, likely there are others. All it takes is focusing on outcome for the user, rather than closing a ticket.

— Hey, we’ve got cases when this feature causes performance issues.

— Remove it altogether, solved. Just look at that burndown chart!

Since we know nothing about how Serif handles stuff internally, I can only guess, but in the other companies it’s not devs that make a final call, but a PM. So to attribute this to the development team alone might be amiss.

[NotMyFault]

28 minutes ago, matisso said:

Since we know nothing about how Serif handles stuff internally, I can only guess, but in the other companies it’s not devs that make a final call, but a PM. So to attribute this to the development team alone might be amiss.

We know a bit from forum posts and other sources. 
 

The decision makers inside Serif are  called developers within the forum, having the role of PM and management and (former) shareholders in union

No further roles or titles are known. Moderators seem to have no say into priorities, neither for bug fixing nor feature requests.  of course this could all be game play to hide internal structures and block valid complaints or requests. 

Some key managers like Ash have some public appearances on YouTube or in news. 
 

The forum app lists all staff members, the company headcount seems quite small. 
 

Serif doesn’t work like huge corporations, even after acquisition by Canva. 

[matisso]

Well, @NotMyFault, that was a side note, really. The most important thing was it seems that Serif choose the approach based on the feature delivery (or removal, like here) rather than the customer value (who, in this particular case, needs a better performance when more LUTs have to be previewed).

<disappointed rant>
I remember being quite on the fence about upgrading to V2. At that time I wasn’t using it for my day to day work, I bit the bullet later, when it was discounted again, treating it as a donation for the cause that, I hoped, would keep Adobe in check in a foreseeable future (and hopefully be a worthy contender at some point).

Currently I am in the middle of the project – using AfPub – which is quite similar to the one I was doing ten years ago in InDesign. The degree to which some features are heavy handedly implemented or missing altogether has been a rude awakening for me. Frankly, I wish I could go back in time and buy a perpetual license for Adobe CS6.
</disappointed rant>

[NotMyFault]

I fully feel and share the pain of you and others who suffer from missing essential features, unacceptable bug regressions, crippled functionality, bad**3 UI, lack of transparency, communication, bad prioritization, …. But I get tired repeating this over and over again, so focusing on more interesting things