Lightroom tip: Lightroom’s new Adaptive Color profile is MUCH better than it sounds

So what?, you’re thinking. Why do we need another generic Adobe profile when we can choose one that matches the camera’s own rendition and picture styles, or choose one of Adobe’s many built in black and white, creative, modern or vintage profiles? Well let’s see…

When you process RAW files in Lightroom you might just accept the default Adobe Color profile and do all your adjustments from there. But these profiles are important. They are a kind of ‘pre-processing’ to change the look and feel of your images before you even start adjusting them.

You’ll find Profiles in the Basic tab, via a drop-down menu that lets you browse them as a list or as real-time thumbnail previews. If you haven’t explored Lightroom Profiles, you should.

Why the new Adaptive Color profile is so clever

Now you might try the Adaptive Color profile on a regular image with no particular tonal issues and decide it hasn’t really done anything. That’s fine. Don’t use it. Use of the Camera Matching profiles instead, or one of Adobe’s many creative alternatives.

But if you try it on an image with a wide contrast range, with clipped highlights and dense, murky shadows, something magical happens. The profile recovers highlights, reveals the shadows and does it so realistically and naturally that you might not need to do any other editing. It is spectacularly effective on ‘difficult’ images.

Realistically, I’d say that one-third of the time it’s a massive improvement, one-third of the time it’s a marginal gain and you might want to use a different, more expressive profile, and one-third of the time it really doesn’t work well – but that’s still a pretty good success rate!

Why it’s not the same as Auto adjustments

We’ve always been able to use Lightroom’s one-click Auto button to fix an image’s Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks, but it doesn’t always work well. Sometimes it fixes everything, sometimes the results just look a bit rubbish.

There are two issues with the Auto button. The first is that it also hikes the Saturation and Vibrance levels to a point where the image often looks just awful – so you may have to go in and manually wind these back to zero.

The second is that it ‘pre-loads’ the editing tools with some quite strong adjustments, so you don’t have as much editing headroom if you want to take things further.

But the Adaptive Color profile does its work ahead of any editing tool adjustments. The editing tools stay at their zero settings, so you have much more editing leeway later. The other, even better thing, is that it doesn’t mess with the vibrance and saturation. The results from the Adaptive Color profile are way better and more natural looking than those from the Auto button.

Is the Adaptive Color profile really that good?

Yes, I rather think it is. I’ve used it now on dozens of challenging  images, and each time it produces a much better result than Auto adjustments. It’s also more controllable because, as with any profile, you can adjust its strength. And if you think it hasn’t gone quite far enough with shadow recovery, for example, you can fix that with the regular Shadows slider.

It seems the Adaptive Color profile uses AI to recognise specific subjects and regions for selective enhancement, and from time to time I do think it’s possible to see a faint masking ‘glow’ around some objects or outlines, but most of the  time you don’t see a thing.

There are some things to be aware of, though. First, you can only use one profile on an image. If you use the Adaptive Color profile on an image, that rules out all the others, including any of your favorite camera matching or creative looks.

Second, you can use the Adaptive Color profile OR the Auto button BUT NOT BOTH. They are both trying to do the same job and they will clash horribly.

Third, you may notice a new ‘refresh’ icon at the end of the Develop panel toolbar. If this turns amber it means you’ve applied an adjustment that affects the workings of the Adaptive Color profile, and you might want to refresh it. What you may also find is that if you apply this profile to an image you’ve corrected for dynamic range the old way, maybe with masks, it can look absolutely awful.

So there are some operational factors to take into account when using the Adaptive Color profile, but honestly, I think it’s so effective and so useful that I really am going to be using it a lot going forward.