P: Adaptive Profiles

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

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 :

[drtonyb]

@Sean Goodhart 

You can also use it in Develop (the keyboard short cut) and is under the menu item Settings > Update AI Settings, but is only available if Auto Sync is enabled.

[Dave@clicMonde]

I find the initial rendering to be rather 'bleached out' - is it just me?

[kevinm62798992]

So I really love the adaptive colour feature. I use it combined with many of the presets that I have created for for automotive photography. Here is my issue. Once I apply the adaptive colour and my presest my editing is done. But when I close then reopen Lightroom I have to reapply the adaptive colour feature. I have to do this to everyphoto I have do any editing to. Any thoughts on why this is happening?

[kevinm62798992]

So I just reclicked on a photo that I just reapplied the adaptive colour to and I have to reapply it again. This would be the third time applying it. second within the program being open

[Jim 185]

I use the adaptive poreset maybe 25% of the time. The main issue I find is that they intensify greens too much. They can also lighten the background when I was purposefully keeping it dark.

But there are times it hits the mark !!

[Cory Hammond]

Have noticed the same with greens in particular, requiring desaturation or reducing vibrance

[thomas5CED]

+1 to the previous comment. I also noticed that the adaptive color profile just shifts green and partially blue tones too much. I mostly do landscape shots with a lot of vegetation. The luminosity adjustments done by adaptive color are usually pretty good, but the images end up with a green and slightly blue tint to them. 

[JerryBEsq]

Great addition. Does a very good job.

 Now, you need to change the color of the adjustment sliders for all masks so that there is no confusion with the global sliders.

[Kev_Tbay]

Has there been an upgrade to the Adaptive profile settings in Lightroom? It was much "better" before the previous update. Now it does very little to an image. It definitely has changed becuase when I go back to a previos image it shows that it has used "Adaptive Color v1". Has anyone elese noticed this change? Can't find any discussion of it online. 

[BorisTheBlade]

Hello - thank you for reaching out to the team. Would you be able to share with us an example file you are seeing this behavior on, along with all the settings, so we can verify on our end?

[Cory Hammond]

It works reasonably well as a starting point in most cases (thus saving time) but utterly fails in some situations. I don't have a good feel for when it will and won't work yet. It does consistently under-expose and over-saturate and there is a tendency for over-doing the HDR look (great to have the slider to reduce the effect).

[BBuzan549]

At first, I didn't like the adaptive color profile. It was oversaturated and didn't look good. However, I later found that if I cropped and adjusted the white balance first, I had better luck with it as a starting point.

[thomas5CED]

I don't think the crop or white balance influences the adaptive color profile. I did a quick test and it doesn't matter whether you crop first and then apply the adaptive profile or the other way around. Are you referring to the "Auto" button by any chance?

[Dal_s_Photography]

Just used the "adaptative color" for a photo I could have deleted, it was rescued! Later, Denoise, an blur, came to finish the rescue. I loved that I could do this with a Fujifilm RAF file! 

[CaroleSD]

Apdaptive seems to give a new base and balance of colors.   I look at it as artistic preference.  

[Taurus on Adobe]

The Adaptive Profile for RAF files in LRC seems to bring out the shadows very well. Conversly, it faults on the side of too much exposure and I almost always have to dial it back. Many times I check to see what it will do and then reset to the original as a starting point.

[BorisTheBlade]

The Adaptive Profile for RAF files in LRC seems to bring out the shadows very well. Conversly, it faults on the side of too much exposure and I almost always have to dial it back. Many times I check to see what it will do and then reset to the original as a starting point.

By @Taurus on Adobe

Hello - would you be able to share some example files which exhibit this behavior so we can analyze them and see how we can improve? Thanks.

[nathank58160098]

Shot photos on a ferry boat (day after my sister's wedding lunch cruise) during daytime with bright overcast skies. The lighting in the boat was dim, especially versus the outside glare. I had to expose in between to avoid blowing things out, the adaptive color has been great at restoring the view out the boat while allowing for proper exposure of subjects inside. These photos are much better for it!

[Kh�rt Williams]

I love this! I’ve been using the adaptive profiles for a few months now, mostly on photos from my iPhone 16 Pro, and they really do make the starting point feel more tuned to the image—especially with tricky lighting. The effect is subtle but helps bring out detail without pushing things too far. When I’m editing images from my X-T3, I know exactly which profile I want and how to get the look I’m after, but for iPhone shots the adaptive profiles save me time and give me a solid starting point without extra tweaking.

[MatthewDoudt]

Cityscapes & Adaptive Color

I've noticed with city skylines that the Adaptive Color Profile tends to darken the tops of buildings unnaturally as though the darkening of the sky which its doing is also being applied to the buildings that are "in the sky".  I've tried masking the buildings and attempting to brighten the tops with a gradient but it never feels/looks right.   I love what the Adaptive Color does to my DJI Drone Landscapes (I've struggled with DJI's greens a lot in LR Classic) but the skyline buildings issue has forced me to return to other methods when there's a skyline present.

[BorisTheBlade]

Cityscapes & Adaptive Color

I've noticed with city skylines that the Adaptive Color Profile tends to darken the tops of buildings unnaturally as though the darkening of the sky which its doing is also being applied to the buildings that are "in the sky".  I've tried masking the buildings and attempting to brighten the tops with a gradient but it never feels/looks right.   I love what the Adaptive Color does to my DJI Drone Landscapes (I've struggled with DJI's greens a lot in LR Classic) but the skyline buildings issue has forced me to return to other methods when there's a skyline present.

By @MatthewDoudt

Hi Matthew - would you be able to share an example before/after pair of images so we can see what we should be looking at? Thank you.

[rflorentino2000]

O Adaptive Profiles é sensacional, gostaria epnas de fazer algumas observações: 1- ela ativa muito os realces da imagem; 2- ela deixa poucos pontos pretos na imagem, prejudicando o contraste,3- a necessidade de atualização dela de forma manual quando editamos mais a foto é muito decepcionante, na minha opinião isso deve ser feito automáticamente, havendo um botão para selecionar isso ou não, já que para lagums pessoas esse processo pode demorar mais caso ele estja sempre ativado automaticamente.

[rflorentino2000]

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.

[Stephen Shankland]

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.