Adobe releases new “Profiles” feature to Lightroom and ACR plus other Lightroom updates

Adobe has released a series of updates to their suite of Lightroom software and Adobe Camera Raw. Let's take the updates one at a time, starting with perhaps the biggest change, the new "Profiles."

Camera Profiles, which have been in Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw, are no more, they've been replaced with "Profiles." Profiles are now in the "Basic" panel, whereas they used to be in Camera Calibration panel, in Lightroom Classic and ACR and are now at the top of the edit panel in Lightroom CC. In addition to the new name and location, Profiles have been expanded to include over 40 new Creative profiles and a new profile browser. There are still camera matching profiles, of course, which are now also available in Lightroom CC, but now there is a creative twist to profiles. Enhancing the creative flavor are profiles from a number of top preset creators and Adobe is working with more to create additional profiles.

To ensure we're on the same page, what are "profiles"? Profiles are used within Adobe software to render your raw images into visible data. Differences in how a profile is designed leads to differences in how that information is rendered. For example, a different profile can lead to a variation in color, contrast, exposure, range and more.

In addition to the creative profiles, Adobe has created six brand new Adobe Raw profiles, which now complement the tried-and-true Adobe Standard profile. These profiles are designed to create a unified look across images regardless of which camera was used to capture the photo. The half dozen new profiles are: Color, Monochrome, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral and Vivid. For more information on each of these new profiles, click here.

The new creative profiles fall into four groups: Artistic, Black and White, Modern and Vintage. Some of the new creative profiles have been created by top preset creators including Brian Matiash, Contrastly, DVLOP, Jared Platt, Matt Kloskowski, Nicolesy, Prolost and RNI.

In addition to Profiles, Adobe has updated Lightroom Classic CC, Lightroom CC Desktop and Lightroom CC for mobile devices. For Lightroom Classic, updates include the new Profiles, of course, but also an enhanced tone curve and adjustments, Dehaze being added to the Basic panel, improved face detection and new camera and lens support. Lightroom CC for desktop likewise has Profile integration, but also includes support for NAS disk drives, new filtering options and new camera and lens support. On mobile devices, iOS's Lightroom CC has Profiles plus a new "Geometry" tab, grain options, left-handed editing mode on iPad, enhanced control over Lightroom CC Web sharing, new camera/lens support and optimizations to layout on iPhone X. Android and ChromeOS users have additions to the "Details" tab, grain options, web sharing control and camera/lens support. More information on all the updates can be found here.

The new Adobe Lightroom updates are available now.