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 :

[Caroline39004181n28b]

For landscape shots with heavy snow, Adaptive Color often makes the photo too dark.

The classic "Auto" settings usually handle this scenario well.

[wulf_6565]

A basic but annyoing handling issue on LRC (at least on a Mac): If you apply the Adaptive Profile to an image using the mouse/Pad, you cannot move to the next picture using the cursor keys, you have to click first into the image row on the bottom of the screen. this is differently with the "Auto" button, there you can place the mouse cursor on that button and the cursor keys stay functional. 

[AdrianEvansPhotography]

won't even work since update, reinstalled etc useless and you want to start charging x2 the price when my 10 year plus sub ends!!

[MartinC_Photos]

Adaptive Profiles certainly show lots of promise and are usually a great starting point for an image (particularly a color one). I've been editing  many high contrast (think snow, bright sky and black rock) scenes this week trying both Adaptive and traditional starting points for an edit.....but only on a non-HDR monitor.

A few thoughts and questions though:

• Is this a tool only for (or best for) those with HDR monitors? I don't have one so I can't tell.
• Why is my main LrC histogram so different from my curves histogram for an image with Adaptive Monochrome applied - see screenshot)? (something to do with HDR I suspect?) And which histogram to use when editing?
• Increasing the contrast slider (from zero) after Adaptive Color only seems to darken the image by pulling down the darker tones whilst fixing the lightest tones. I've even see the lightest tones reduce on some images! Admittedly the contrast is increased but not in an average luminisoty way as I'd expect. This is not a bad thing - it's just unexpected. It is easily "solved" by increasing the white slider. 
• High contrast color landscapes can often end up looking too "crunchy" - (think overdone HDR simulatiion from 20 years ago!).
• Adaptive profiles are a great starting point for skies in landscapes but everything else appears too dark. 

This isn't a complaint - just initial views, feedback and questions. 

Mac Sequoia 15.3.1

LrC  14.2

[Tony Rican]

This needs to work for event photographers. It doesn't skin tones and harsh / low light situations really struggle. As a pro user I don't need this for a simple or unchanging series of photos. I can apply setting across the series, and even match exposures with existing tools. What I need is a scene / content aware edit. This isn't it from what I can see, which is too bad. It's not that hard to account for the types of scenes that event photographers usually encounter. If adobe would like work with me, I have 100k+ edited photos from standard event photography scenes they could use to train a model.

[LC331590529y6b]

And that seems to be part of the problem that some are experiencing, is that the Adaptive effect is different from photo to photo even in a sequence. I have no doubt that the feature will be improved over time though.

[jrsforums]

Question.....does the Adaptive profile execution rely primarily on the CPU or GPU?  My quick observation is that it is more CPU dependent.

[josued88938033]

The new Adobe LrC update promised better performance, but in my case, after updating I have noticed slower performance. After applying the 'Adaptive Profile' to a group of images, the application becomes slow, it takes a long time to switch from one image to another in the development tab.

[wojciechd46516237]

Hello, I've noticed posterizing effect on sky after export to JPG format. This effect isn't visible in Ligtroom Develop mode, but after export. You can see the difference in attached photos: with applied adaptive profile (more contrast, darker sky) and w/o profile.

[Avilev]

I like both the new Adaptive profiles. I usally don't have to make much of an adjustment after applying. BUT I would love to have them applied when importing my RAW images into Lightroom Classic. I can't find the option for that in the preferences or in the profile option when importing. Suggestions?

[nduka f.23665547edx7]

the adaptive color is a game change for me it give me the baseline for my editing