Presets & LUT Export

A Film Look is one of the 29 recipes built into the plugin. A preset is yours: whatever you have built on a node, saved to a file so you can bring it back or hand it to someone else. The Presets group sits on the Camera tab, directly under the Film Look menu, closed by default.

Both operations here need a license. The buttons are visible in the demo, but they refuse to run until you activate. See From Demo to Licensed for what that page already covers about the watermark and activation.

What a preset stores

Export writes out every control the plugin owns as a look: the stocks, the Lab tab, Adjustments, Halation, and Grain, exactly as they read on the node at the moment you click.

It leaves out the controls that depend on your footage or your system rather than the look. Color Management (Transfer Function, Gamut), Quality, Effect Strength, and the per-stage Opacity sliders are not saved. The Overview lists the same split for a built-in Film Look, and a preset follows the identical rule. Import a preset onto a node with different Color Management or Quality settings and those settings stay put.

Saving a preset

Type a name into Preset Name, then click Export Preset…. The file is written with a .filmemulsion extension. The plugin cleans the name up into a safe filename if it needs to, then sets Preset Name to the name it actually saved.

The plugin writes it to a fixed folder rather than asking where to save, since there is no file browser in this dialog. On a successful save it tells you exactly where the file landed:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/PixelTools/FilmEmulsion/Presets
• Windows: %APPDATA%\PixelTools\FilmEmulsion\Presets

If that folder cannot be created, the file goes to your Desktop instead, and the confirmation message says so.

To share a preset, hand the .filmemulsion file to another editor or another machine. They drop it into their own Presets folder (or their Desktop, since import checks both), type the file’s own name into Preset Name, and import. Nothing else needs to travel with the file.

Loading a preset

Type the preset’s name into Preset Name and click Import Preset…. The plugin looks for that name in the Presets folder first, then on the Desktop, checking .filmemulsion first and the older .ptfe extension after, so presets saved by earlier versions of the plugin still load.

Every control the preset stores is set at once, the same as picking a Film Look. The Film Look menu switches to Custom, because an imported preset does not join the built-in list. To move on from the imported settings, pick a Film Look from the menu, or No Preset, which replaces them the same way it replaces any hand-tuned look.

LUT export

Export LUT (.cube)… bakes the current color pipeline into a 3D LUT you can load into a Resolve node, or hand to an editor working somewhere the plugin is not installed.

What is in the LUT

The cube carries Adjustments, Negative, and Print, with the Lab tab’s settings folded into those two stages. That covers the stock’s color and contrast response, any push or pull, bleach-bypass or cross-process treatment, and your exposure and grade adjustments.

Halation and grain are not in the file. A LUT maps one input color to one output color, and both of those stages need to look at neighboring pixels or vary by position in the frame, which a color lattice cannot express. If your look uses either, run the plugin alongside the LUT for the texture, with Adjustments, Negative, Print, and Lab switched off so the color is not applied twice, or accept a flatter version without it.

A LUT also approximates rather than reproduces the plugin’s own render. It samples the pipeline at a fixed number of points and interpolates between them, so it is close to what the node produces, not identical to it.

Choosing where it goes

LUT Folder offers two destinations:

• Resolve LUT folder: the per-OS location Resolve scans for third-party LUTs. After exporting here, refresh Resolve’s LUT list so the new file appears in the panel.
• Documents / PixelTools: a plain folder under your Documents, for LUTs you want to find yourself. To load one through Resolve’s LUT panel, copy it into the Resolve LUT folder first, then refresh the list.

If the Resolve folder cannot be created on your system, the plugin falls back to the Documents location automatically and says so in the confirmation message.

Using the exported LUT

Type a name into Preset Name (it doubles as the LUT’s file name), pick a LUT Folder, and click Export LUT (.cube)…. Load the resulting .cube on a node the same way you would load any third-party LUT, through Resolve’s LUT panel once the file is in the Resolve LUT folder and the list has been refreshed.

The LUT is baked at the Color Management the node was set to when you exported, and it hands the image back in that same space. Load it with the same Transfer Function and Gamut that fed the plugin, or the color will not match. If the node is set to a scene-linear Transfer Function, the plugin warns you in the confirmation message. A linear LUT samples the shadows coarsely and clips anything above 1.0, so a log input space bakes a cleaner LUT.

Plugin or LUT

Reach for the plugin itself whenever halation or grain are part of the look, when you are still adjusting the recipe, or when the artist downstream also has the plugin installed. Reach for the LUT when you need to hand off a fixed look to a suite without the plugin, or when you want the color response baked into a node that does not carry a paid-plugin dependency. The Grading with Film/Emulsion™ guide covers running the plugin itself across a project.

Controls

Next: Performance & Backends covers Quality, the render backends, and what each one costs.