Thanks for your reply. Admittedly, I am digging much deeper into the inner working of Lightroom than is necessary for the average user, but I’m working on creating some custom profiles/presets to do some pretty unorthodox things (could almost say I’m trying to “hack” custom profiles to do things that Lightroom isn’t really meant to do) and I’m finding it necessary to understand where the various tools are operating within the pipeline in relation to the various parts of the profile (and exactly what sort of data they are operating on) in order to make the profiles as powerful as possible. It’s clear to me that some of the selective edit tools are either not working on the same image at the same point in the pipeline or performing slightly different transforms. For my purposes, for instance, it makes a difference whether the tools are working on the image before or after the profile look table, hue-sat map, and calibration panel. So, right now, what I’m trying to figure out specifically is how the WB and exposure sliders relate to the image vs the basic panel sliders. I suspect that while the basic panel wb sliders are working on the pre-demosaic image and are subject to an interpolated chromatic adaptation adjustment (based on the profile color matrices), perhaps the local adjustment white balance is applied after debayering and without chromatic adaptation, etc. You’re definitely right that nobody seems to know the details on this kind of stuff! I’ll try to come up with some experiments to figure it out..
