Adobe has unveiled a significant update to the Camera Profiles in Lightroom CC and Classic and Adobe Camera Raw, introducing six new raw profiles and 40 Creative profiles for photographers.
Profiles are what the software uses to convert the raw digital data from your image files into colours and tones rendered on our monitor. Adobe builds profiles for every new camera, for instance, which take into consideration that camera’s sensor performance.
Until now Adobe software has used the Adobe Standard profile as its base from which to render raw images, and today the company has added six more.
Adobe Colour: designed to improve the look and rendering of warm tones, improving the transitions between colour ranges, and slightly increasing the starting contrast of your images. Adobe Colour is the new default profile replacing Adobe Standard (but only for newly imported photos), and has been designed to work on the widest range of images.
Adobe Monochrome: designed as a starting point for black and white images, emphasising better tonal separation and contrast than photos that start off in Adobe Standard and are converted into black and white.
Adobe Portrait: provides more control and better reproduction of all types of skin tones. This profile applies less contrast and saturation to skin tones throughout the photo, you have more control over the look.
Adobe Landscape: designed for landscape images, emphasising vibrant skies and foliage tones.
Adobe Neutral: provides a starting point for images with a very low amount of contrast. Adobe says it’s useful for images where you want the most control or photos that have very difficult tonal ranges.
Adobe Vivid: designed to provide a punchy, saturated starting point.
Meanwhile, the 40 new Creative profiles have been split into four groups: Artistic, Black & White, Modern and Vintage.
These profiles can be applied to any image, both raw and non-raw. Adobe has also included a 3D Lookup Table to add a colour grading effect to the image and more precision than was previously available.
Adobe also announced some performance updates to its Lightroom versions. You can read the full list of updates here.