There are two ways to deploy a profile within Copado Essentials. The platform allows you to do either a full update of your profiles and permission sets or an incremental update, which is something that is unique within the DevOps space.
The updating and deploying of a full profile is a simple process. If you go to your component pick list, select the "Profile" component type, and select the profile you're working on - it's going to capture all of the changes that have been made to the profile as they currently stand.
The incremental path is beneficial because you don’t actually have to deploy/import the entire profile or permission set to update a particular component. It removes the fear of deploying profiles and allows you to deploy particular components on profiles, at the speed that you want to deploy them.
So if you deploy a profile with the Standard Deployment type, it is going to look only at the referenced components in your deployment. Meaning, that if you select a profile and some corresponding components (custom fields or objects), it'll only update those selected components on that profile.
Also worth mentioning, when it comes to the permissions of those selected components on profiles, you can incrementally update those as well. Under the Deploy Options tab, you have an option of doing a "Profile-Only" deployment, which is used for updating component permissions, not the components. Here's a screenshot of what that setup/process looks like below.
