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 :

[tom_4528]

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) 

[maxr62203719]

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.  

[BorisTheBlade]

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.

[photosbydc]

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.

[BorisTheBlade]

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.

[jonwe1964]

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. 

[BorisTheBlade]

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.