Why Your Lightroom Profile Choice Quietly Shapes the Entire Edit

Scenes can look flat fast once the sky and the shadows start fighting each other. The way you start your Lightroom edit can decide whether you keep detail in the bright areas and still get color that feels intentional.

Coming to you from Christian Möhrle, this practical video walks through a full Lightroom edit built around the "Adobe Neutral" profile. Möhrle begins with a high-contrast landscape and treats it like a file that needs room to breathe before any style decisions land. Instead of chasing instant punch, he starts by pulling the tones closer together so later moves do not turn into damage control. You see how a flatter starting point can keep the sky from turning harsh while still letting the foreground hold detail. The key idea is not that one profile is “best,” but that the profile choice quietly changes how every slider behaves.

Early on, he shows a simple way to deal with a scene that has bright highlights and deep shadows without getting messy. The approach is practical if the shot was captured in a quick, imperfect moment, including handheld frames that are not perfectly aligned. He straightens and crops with a clear intent: keep the main peak centered while protecting foreground shapes that carry the image. Then he makes a point that gets missed in a lot of edits: if the base render adds contrast before you even touch exposure, you end up spending the rest of the session undoing it. You also see why a “less contrast” starting point can make highlight recovery feel smoother, especially in skies that are already close to the edge.

From there, the edit moves into global adjustments, but not in the usual “crank everything” way. Exposure, shadows, and blacks get lifted to reveal information that is already there, and highlights get pulled back to calm down the brightest areas. White balance is pushed colder for the land while leaving room to treat the sky differently later. Color intensity gets handled with restraint at first, with the understanding that the neutral profile starts less saturated than punchier options. Texture, clarity, and dehaze come in as finishing tools for structure, not as a substitute for good tone work.

The most useful section is where masking becomes a clean plan instead of a pile of random selections. Möhrle leans on Lightroom’s landscape masking to separate mountains from sky with a crisp edge, then refines it with gradients so only the parts that matter stay active. He builds the sky in layers: one mask to brighten and warm the glow near the horizon, another to darken and cool the upper sky, and another to push more targeted color where the sky still feels thin. After the sky, he shifts attention to the mountains for added contrast and a cooler feel, then isolates the icy foreground to sharpen it and nudge the color without turning it neon. He also uses a more selective method to pick out small bright patches in the foreground and lift them, which changes how your eye moves through the frame. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Möhrle.

And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out our latest tutorial, "Photographing the World: Japan II - Discovering Hidden Gems with Elia Locardi!”