Have you noticed the new Adaptive Presets in the latest Lightroom update? Have you tried to use them like regular presets, but were not really sure exactly how they work?
Adaptive Presets were first introduced to Lightroom Classic back in June 2022. The update to Lightroom Classic in October 2022 introduced even more usability with new masking updates. These Adaptive Presets, which apply masks in a single click, can allow you to make edits to selected areas with ease. Lightroom can now use these Adaptive Presets to enhance an entire portrait at once or to select individual portrait attributes with the tools Enhance Eyes, Whiten Teeth, Darken Eyebrows, and more. But it can do so much more to your other images as well.
Adaptive Portraits
There are several Adaptive Presets in this section from simple enhancements to glamour and just selecting one area at a time. The Enhance Portrait, Glamour Portrait and Gritty Portrait creates several masks for you at once. To access them, scroll down the Preset menu (left side panel) you made need to click on the little drop-down area to see them all.
Simply access the Mask Tools panel to make adjustments to the individual masks. They have even been named for you. If a mask doesn’t apply (like no visible teeth) there will still be a mask but it will have a warning message on it. You can ignore or remove the mask.
Once you select a mask they can each be edited as you wish, although they have already had some adjustments applied when the preset was selected. You can increase or decrease the slider for the various areas. In the above image, I have the comparison from before and after the Glamour Portrait presets was applied.
If you have more than one person in an image, it will create a mask for both at the same time. So, it essentially uses the same masks for both people. If you wish to have different masks for different people you will need to run through People Select and select each person separately.
Adaptive Sky
The Adaptive Sky presets do exactly what the name implies, creating a mask for the sky only. Then it applies a variety of effects and sliders to create drama, or color pop, and color shifts. Of course, you could just do your own with a Select Sky mask and a few tweaks of your own. I used the Blue drama in the below image.
Adaptive Subject
Again, no guessing what these presets do. They will select and mask the main subject in your image and apply a few tweaks, from Warm Pop to Cool Soft and many in between. Nothing overly fancy and yes, the same could be done with the Subject Select mask and a few tweaks. But they can hasten up your workflow if you find something you like. You can hover over the preset to see a preview as well.
So, what is the benefit of these Adaptive Presets? If you are new to masking and making local adjustments, they can be a great place to start and learn how to use them. You can also speed up your workflow, especially with Adaptive Portrait by one-click masking. Using the new People Select tasks several clicks to select each of the masks, so clicking on perhaps Glamour Portrait (I like this one best) saves loads of time. I have only been using it on single-person portraits, but so far it works great.
