In order to highlight the texture details of the image while preserving the smooth region and saving the time to determine the fractional differential order, an improved adaptive fractional differential operator is proposed. Firstly, the classical Tiansi template is decomposed into four different directions, which are respectively convolved with the pixels to be processed to achieve the effect of enhancing the texture details of the image. Secondly, the current situation of the optimal differential order is determined by the experiment for the Tiansi operator. The local feature information of the image constructs a fractional order model with an adaptive ability, which can obtain more detailed information than the original image. The experimental results of multiple sets of different scene images show that the constructed adaptive fractional differential operators effectively enhance the texture details of the image. The subjective visual effects and objective evaluation indexes of the adaptive fractional differential operators are better than the original images. The average gradient, information entropy and contrast in the objective evaluation index are increased by 190.3%, 8.1%, and 18.3%, respectively. The average gradient and contrast are 45.0% and 9.6% higher than that of the Tiansi operator.