Last year Lightroom and Camera Raw introduced support for creating and editing high dynamic range images. This year we are adding a new AI-powered profile to help you create great looking high dynamic range and standard dynamic range images quickly.
Assigning a profile to a photo determines how the photo is rendered in the absence of any other adjustments. The profile affects the picture’s overall contrast, as well as the hues and saturation of colors. It is intended as a starting point for editing images. For example, the Adobe Color profile gives you contrast and colors that feel natural, while Adobe Monochrome produces a black and white picture. In most cases you will want to make additional adjustments, for example, balance the picture’s overall brightness, dim overly bright highlights, or lighten shadows that are too dark.
An image-dependent profile based on AI
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.
Through this training process, the AI has learned to lighten subjects slightly, especially if they’re in the foreground or in shadow, to adjust contrast locally in a way that makes people stand out from their backgrounds, to make food brighter, more colorful, and with a cooler white balance than the ambient illumination, and so on. In other words, it effectively has learned the semantics of natural images, and rules of thumb for turning good photographs into better photographs.
For many photos the Adobe Adaptive profile directly produces a rendering that is good enough for sharing or publishing. Of course, the photographer may have something slightly different in mind. In those cases they can fine-tune the images using all the controls available in Camera Raw and make the pictures lighter, darker, or more colorful, or add effects like vignetting. Usually this takes significantly less time than starting with another profile and adjusting everything by hand.
The Adobe Adaptive profile works in both the traditional standard dynamic range (SDR) mode and in the recently introduced high dynamic range (HDR) mode, where Adobe Adaptive is able to output pictures that feature deep blacks and very bright highlights. On HDR-compatible displays such as the built-in screen on an Apple MacBook Pro (2021 model or newer), photos rendered with Adobe Adaptive can feel as if the screen is a window looking out at the real scene.
The AI built into the profile generates separate HDR and SDR looks that are optimized for the capabilities of the corresponding displays. Which look you see on your screen depends on whether you’ve enabled HDR mode in Camera Raw.
The Adobe Adaptive profile works with raw files from any camera supported by Camera Raw including phones, DSLRs and mirrorless models. It is not currently available for JPEG, TIFF and other non-raw image file formats.
Below are some examples of how Adobe Adaptive can help make your photos look good. The pictures are SDR JPEG images produced by Camera Raw. If your screen and your browser support HDR, hover your mouse over the photos to see HDR versions. If you’d like to see larger renditions of the HDR versions of these photos with the Adobe Adaptive profile applied, here is a Lightroom album.