An adaptive adjustment deliberately departs from the original look of the scene in some way. Such an adjustment might be relatively subtle, for example, lightening one shot to make it match another. In this case, you are departing from your commitment to the original look in order to achieve shot-to-shot consistency in your sequence. Other kinds of adaptive adjustment might be much more dramatic, for example, applying a gold tint to an entire sequence for an advertising spot or applying extreme adjustments such as posterization or chroma inversion for a music video.

Generally, it is a good idea to achieve an effective restorative adjustment before you begin adaptive adjustments. You will then be building on an image that has good color characteristics. Most viewers can probably perceive the difference between a restored, well-balanced image with a strong blue tint applied and an unrestored, poorly lit image with a strong blue tint applied (and prefer the former).