How to remove bulk imported LUTs from Affinity Photo

Delete Imported Luts Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo is a great and affordable alternative to Photoshop. While it does lack some of the features that Photoshop offers, the software is constantly being developed and improved on. For most “average” computer users, it does a fine job.

One feature that recently rolled out, is the ability to import LUTs in bulk to easily preview these adjustments right inside Affinity Photo. Previously, this had to be done one-by-one. Absolute nightmare, we know.

Some users have reported issues with crashing when using this new feature, but we?ve not experienced any such problems. In fact, the whole reason for this guide is because we actually imported way more LUTs than needed. Duplicate LUTs. A whole lot of them.

The featured was added with Affinity Photo, version 1.9.0, which was released in February 2021. Being unable to resist the urge to see ?what does this button do? after spotting the new import feature (top tip: always read the changelog), I imported an unsorted LUTs folder which was basically just the giant dump folder of ‘stuff to deal with?. Welp.

Amazingly, despite the heavy load, Affinity did not crash when opening these ? it just took a bit of time to load.

But I did not want or need all of these pre-sets. And there was no obvious way to remove the bulk import since Affinity Photo does not appear to store these in a folder.

There also does not appear to be a way to multi-select these in Affinity Photo to delete in one go. The only option, it seemed, was to do a complete reinstall and wipe all the custom user settings (unless these are laboriously exported) or to delete the LUTs one by one.

Easy way to delete bulk imported LUTs from Affinity Photo

Turns out, there is a super simple way to delete those over-enthusiastically imported LUTs without straining your clicking hand or losing all of your settings. This useful tip can be applied to a whole bunch of settings if you want to do a light reset on other presets in Affinity Photo, too.

Affinity Photo has a very handy “hidden” menu that not many people know about. You can use it to do a hard reset of user settings whithout the rigmarole of a reinstall or to simply reset parts of your presets, in this case: a whole lot of LUTs.

A word of warning if you plan to use this, though. You will lose all your adjustment settings and not just the LUTs you imported. You’ll have to export these settings for each option if you want to retain them.

To bring up the “hidden” Affinity Photo resetting menu, hold the CTRL key on your keyboard while starting up the programme. You should be greeted with a menu that looks like the screenshot below.

Affinity Photo Hidden Reset Settings Menu
A screenshot of Affinity Photo’s hidden reset menu on Windows.

Since we’re dealing specifically with deleting LUTs imported in bulk for this article, make sure you only tick the “Reset Adjustments” box. Untick the rest or you will lose all your other settings? and for that, we shall not be held responsible.

Once you’ve done that, hit clear and order should be restored and you can return to a life of importing LUTs a bit more cautiously… now that you know what that button does.

This tutorial was done on a machine running Windows 10. The same menu should show up with the CTRL key on a Mac, but as per some users on the Affinity Photo forums, you might need to select “Open” from the contextual menu to avoid conflicts.