The latest version of Camera Raw includes a new profile, called Adobe Adaptive. Unlike existing profiles such as Adobe Color or Adobe Landscape, Adobe Adaptive is image dependent. An AI model analyzes the photo and adjusts tones and colors to make them look just right. The effect is as if the AI had changed Exposure, Shadows, Highlights, Color Mixer, Curves and other controls for you, although the actual controls stay in their original neutral position.
The AI has been trained on thousands of hand-edited photos of people, pets, food, architecture, museum exhibits, cars, ships, airplanes, landscapes, and many other subjects. The photo collection covers various types of artificial lighting, as well as natural light during different seasons and times of day. The edited pictures were reviewed by a team of photographers to ensure a consistent style that looks appealing and natural, avoiding opinionated renderings with extreme contrast or unusual color choices.
Florian Kainz, Marc Levoy, & Lars Jebe
With Lightroom’s latest update, this feature has officially arrived in the Lightroom apps as well. I’m all for new features to enhance and expedite photo editing, but I’m a bit conflicted on this one. I like the concept of tweaking color profiles to individual images, but at the same time it feels like the implementation takes a lot of control out of the hand of the photographer and obscures it behind ‘magical’ AI algorithms.
While you can still use regular sliders and curves after applying an adaptive profile, abstracting away part of the editing process feels wrong. People starting out and struggling with Lightroom’s multiple options might find it easier to get a good result quicker, but they would do so without learning about editing in the process and thus will have a harder time breaking out of this predefined style into their own creative choices. In contrast, the older Intelligent Auto Settings would move sliders around based on AI models, but this was done transparently in the interface, so anyone could still tweak sliders individually and inspect how each of them impact the image on screen.
The Adobe Adaptive profile adjusts a photo’s tone and color. Some of these adjustments operate globally across the entire image, while others operate only locally, around edges and in skies and main subjects.
Adjustments in Lightroom and Camera Raw are non-destructive, meaning that the pixel values in your original photograph never change. Also, Adobe Adaptive adjusts the images without moving any sliders. How does it accomplish this?
It creates tables, which you don't see directly, but which are applied to the photograph as it is rendered on the screen. Tonal adjustments are performed using something called a Profile Gain Table Map (PGTM), and color adjustments are performed using an RGB lookup table (RGBT) — actually three tables: one for the entire image, one for the sky, and one for the main subject if there is one.
I played around with adaptive profiles on some recent images, as well as some older landscape photos, but personally I find the results a bit underwhelming. The colors from Adobe’s standard profiles have always been a bit too desaturated for my tastes, and that is still the case with adaptive profiles. I much prefer using camera profiles, either the Landscape or Portrait version depending on the main subject in the picture; Adobe’s Vivid comes closest to these, but I generally default to camera matching regardless. Because adaptive profiles are somewhat incompatible with Auto Settings, which I incorporated into my default presets as a starting point for fast edits, it would probably take a readjustment of my workflow to use them effectively.
With editing tools advancing so much from one year to the next, it makes for an interesting dilemma about how to approach photo editing. New techniques can drastically alter the look of an image and your workflow, so it pays to revisit images and redevelop them from the initial RAW file. One of my new favorite tricks lately is to use the color grading panel to subtly enhance contrast in the shadows, midtones and highlights, which can give a certain glow to the final result that I haven’t seen matched by other tools. It’s possible that adaptive profiles could lead to a similar or more impactful shift, although for now I remain skeptical.
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