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Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
February 7, 2025
Question

P: Adaptive Profiles

  • February 7, 2025
  • 87 replies
  • 38961 views

This post applies to Lightroom Classic and Lightroom Desktop.  
Feedback for Camera Raw should be posted here.

 

Update February 2025:

Adobe has introduced two Adaptive Profiles – Adaptive Color & Adaptive B&W.

 

Getting started with the Adaptive Profiles: 

  • Access a profile inside the profile favorites menu. 
  • In addition, there is a new section for Adaptive Profiles in the Profiles browser. 
  • Enable the profile and adjust the ‘Amount’ slider as desired. 
  • Use the rest of the Camera Raw tools just like you would otherwise. 


Check out the Help Page for more detailed usage information. For more technical information on the underlying technology, please refer to this blog post

 

Please try the profiles and share feedback in this community forum thread. It would help to include details like how you access Camera Raw (via Adobe Bridge or Photoshop), your computer system details, and as much information as possible about what you like or do not like about the resulting image quality. Our team will continually monitor this thread to track issues and improve the future experience. 

 

Best practices for using the Adaptive Profiles:
 

Try the new profile in the following scenarios: 

  • For food scenes. 
  • In situations where simply moving Tone and Color sliders may not be sufficient, such as for: high-contrast scenes, landscape or cityscape scenes with skies. 
  • For High-Dynamic-Range (HDR) photography, simply select Adaptive Color or Adaptive B&W as a profile and click on the ‘HDR’ button. 

    Note: Adaptive Profiles generate HDR and Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) data jointly, creating photos that look consistent with one another. In other words, after applying either of these profiles, if you toggle the HDR button on or off, you will see either the adaptive HDR or SDR look, depending on the position of the toggle.  


To maximize the value of using Adaptive Profiles, please follow these steps: 

  • Always start from the Adobe Default or Camera Default rendering (with no other edits) and enable the Adaptive Profile first. 
  • Reset any other settings before applying the profile. 
  • Make additional global and local edits after assigning the profile, just as you would begin to edit photos with Adobe Color or any other profile. 


Boris Ajdin: Product Manager, Emerging Products Group 


Posted by :

87 replies

Participant
March 9, 2026

Adaptive profiles are extremely useful in editing wildlife photography in harsh light. The color changes to both WB and saturation make the profile seem a bit like an auto type of adjustment. Greens are the biggest problem. It would be good to see this modified.

JamesStuff
Participant
February 26, 2026

It would be nice if we could export or saved the generated colour profile and apply them to other images. Sometime if I want to export a sequence the colour interpretation will change noticeably when the camera settings have stayed the same in the burst.

Participating Frequently
February 24, 2026

I would appreciate more camera profiles being added to Lightroom Classic. I would love one for editing my images taken with the DJI Mavic 4 Pro. 

jonwe1964
Participant
October 29, 2025

I'm applying the adaptive colour profile and out of the box it does a great job of dodging and burning however I'm finding that I usually end up pulling the 'amount' slider down to about 50% to prevent the colours being excessively saturated. Unfortunately that then reduces the amount of dodging, burning and general exposure changes it makes so I have to modify those separately.  So, 

 

As an end user who applies the adaptive colour profile, I'd like to be able to separately control the 'amount' of colour modifications applied and the 'amount' of general exposure changes applied.  For example, this might be done by providing two 'amount' sliders, one for 'colour' and one for 'everything else', where the 'everything else' slider controls the amount of dodge/burn/exposure/highlights/blacks/highlights etc changes applied. 

Adobe Employee
October 29, 2025
quote

I'm applying the adaptive colour profile and out of the box it does a great job of dodging and burning however I'm finding that I usually end up pulling the 'amount' slider down to about 50% to prevent the colours being excessively saturated. Unfortunately that then reduces the amount of dodging, burning and general exposure changes it makes so I have to modify those separately.  So, 

 

As an end user who applies the adaptive colour profile, I'd like to be able to separately control the 'amount' of colour modifications applied and the 'amount' of general exposure changes applied.  For example, this might be done by providing two 'amount' sliders, one for 'colour' and one for 'everything else', where the 'everything else' slider controls the amount of dodge/burn/exposure/highlights/blacks/highlights etc changes applied. 


By @jonwe1964

Thank you for sharing your use case and your suggestion. This is something we are thinking about and will put up on the Product team's agenda to discuss the best path forward. In the meantime, please feel free to share more about your workflow, when Adaptive Profile work for you and when they don't, or any other thoughts on how they could be improved.

Participant
October 29, 2025

Adaptive color doesn't work well for people. Editing a group of women from a wedding. The adaptive color adds an odd grain and unflattering texture to their skin.

Adobe Employee
October 29, 2025
quote

Adaptive color doesn't work well for people. Editing a group of women from a wedding. The adaptive color adds an odd grain and unflattering texture to their skin.


By @photosbydc

We am sorry to hear Adaptive Profiles are not doing a good job on your photos with people. Would you be open to sharing a raw image as an example so we can debug the issue on our end and find ways to improve the feature? Sadly the forum platform does not (yet) support raw DNG upload, so I'd like to kindly ask you to share via a file sharing service like Box or Google Drive. Thank you very much.

Geoff the kiwi
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 8, 2025

I am finding this as well.... Adobe Color is much better for skin tones..... happy to supply originals via Dropbox - these are NEF's

Participant
October 18, 2025

I am using adaptive color on landscape HDR photos, and I am generally pleased, especially with the luminosity effects.  I think that it would be better if there were seperate intensity sliders for color and for luminosity, so that I could adjust down the color impact, which is sometimes problematic.  

Adobe Employee
October 20, 2025

This is a great suggestion. We are investigating the possibility of separating the tone and color adjustments for the Adaptive Profiles, to give users more control over the final look before they jump into the standard editing workflow. There are some technical challenges to doing that "right", but we think we can work through those.

Participant
October 6, 2025

It's a handly tool and a nice starting point for outdoor scenes, but not so great for portraits and indoors in low light.  One thing I noticed is how it affects the White setting, as in what happens when you press "Shift" and then click on the slider.  In another profile, that usually adds (or removes) a small amount of White.  But when you start with Adaptive Profiles, it has a tendency to push the White so far to the right it basically blows out the photo.  So, I'm still playing with workflow.
(I've seen a few YouTuber's delare this as the "end of presets", but that's premature hyperbole) 

Participant
September 26, 2025

While you are useing Adaptive Colors, doesnt work with Smart previews editing off source datas.

Stephen Shankland
Known Participant
September 7, 2025

I'm generally a fan. Often I dial it back to 40 or 70, sometimes to 10 or 20. For landscape HDR images I've created with Lightroom's Merge to HDR tool, I often prefer Adobe Color + auto tone.

Participant
September 2, 2025

Percebi também que, em alguns casos, a IA reduzir ruído, deforma o rosto das pessoas, no meu caso, estava fzendo uma partida de jogo de futebol. Apliquei as defifinições básicas automáticas, depois fui em reduzir ruído.