P: Adaptive Profiles

I like Adaptive Profile and it is a useful start point for high dynamic range situations. 

I find though that the sky often has a strong halo around trees, buildings, objects etc. A more refined sky adjustment would be good, or the ability to adjust the sky effect.

To fix the sky problem I usually create two versions, one with Adaptive Profile and one with standard profile and blend them by hand in Photoshop 

Finding the Adaptive Color Profile really strong, and considering making it my workflow default, but I’m confused about its precise location in the workflow.

On this page it says “Always start from the Adobe Default or Camera Default rendering (with no other edits) and enable the Adaptive Profile first” 

On another Adobe help page (https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/ai-edit-status.html?trackingid=XB5KHBXP&mv=in-product&mv2=ccx) there’s a listing of “recommended order of operations to avoid unexpected results and achieve the best output” where Adaptive Profiles is shown at number 11 in a 13-point list of AI Edit Operations, after HDR, Noise Reduction, various Distraction Removals, Generatives, Lens Blur and Profiles, Crop and Transform.

Which of these is the correct way in LR Classic?

Using the latest version of Lightroom Classic at the time of writing, the Adaptive Color (AC) profile can be useful for balancing scenes with high contrast and challenging lighting. My use case is primarily portraiture of individuals and groups, mostly outdoors in the shade. It is particularly good at managing blown-out backgrounds, colored interior lighting and contrasty landscape scenes.

However, I thought I’d note a few consistent and reproducible behaviors of the AC profile that stop it from becoming my default choice for editing. These effects are seen mostly applying to portraits taken outdoors in the shade. The pipeline is a .CR3 import directly into LrC in SDR mode.

• For images shot at a WB of approx 4400-5800K, the AC profile cools the apparent color temperature considerably compared to the Standard Preview. It also appears to add a green tint. This isn’t always desirable but would make sense to apply to landscapes more than portraits.
• After applying AC, the image appears more consistently exposed, but is much more sensitive to adjustments – for example, it’s common that AC brings down sun highlights that were originally a bit hot and raises shadows for a more even exposure. However, after applying the profile, if I want the image to ‘pop’ a bit more by raising the exposure or whites, the highlights get too hot almost immediately. Bringing down the highlights slider appears to darken the entire image too, not just the highlights. It feels almost like editing a .jpg instead of a RAW file, as the highlights slider begins to affect the midtones much more than with other profiles.
• Broadly speaking, the Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks adjustments appear to behave significantly differently when using AC as opposed to Adobe Color or Adobe Portrait, more like editing a compressed file than a RAW file. I don’t know if this is reflected in the underlying technology, but I find if AC doesn’t make my image very close to finished on the first try, I tend to abandon it knowing I don’t seem to have as much range of adjustment as I would normally.

Hope that makes sense, it’s a difficult thing to describe! It’s a great starting point for many images, but the flexibility to edit after the profile has been adjusted seems to be limited, particularly for slightly overexposed images or contrasty images.

This sis a good starting point for some photos with difficult lighting.

I have been using Adaptive Profiles to create starting points when editing long sequences of photos shot at 30fps. I notice a few cases in which the first 8 images have stronger effects than the remaining images.  Happens in just a few cases but I have not found a way to get it to be more uniform.  

I photograph birds. I try Adaptive Color occasionally. 30-40% of the time it provides a good starting point. I have noticed that in some photos, I get indications of highlight clipping and nothing I do fixes it except removing the pixels. Perhaps the capability is not intended for nature photos.

When making a new virtual copy (from a file that had the colour adaptive profile applied) to make a black and white version, the typical b&w profiles make for very hard versions; the b&w adaptive profile works fine, and can of course be adjusted further. I typically apply a user preset for toning the image (split toning ) and find that the toning of a b&w image with adaptive b&w is quite different from  a version of the same image processed with a profile other than adaptive. 

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.

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.

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.