One of the most exciting things about the new Profiles feature in Camera Raw and Lightroom is the fact they work with Color Lookup Tables, or LUTs for short. If you’re unfamiliar with LUTs, they’re simply a way to remap one color or tone to another. As an extreme example, if something is a shade of red, you can create an LUT to set that shade of red to be green instead, or whatever color you like. For this reason LUTs are often used for color-grading videos, as they offer a rigid form of toning that creates a uniform effect across the footage.
All kinds of tonal adjustments made in Photoshop can be exported as LUTs. You simply use Adjustment Layers to change the image, then export the Color Lookup…