Despite a recent false alarm concerning price gouging and warnings from the company over use of older software, Adobe's Lightroom remains a highly popular photo workflow option. And the latest updates, announced today, highlight tutorial features powered by photo pros, new sharing options, and even a few actual editing tools—a Texture slider, a Defringe tool, and Flat-Field correction (for Lightroom Classic–only).
New Help From Pros
You've probably gazed at a gorgeous professional photo and wondered, "How did the photographer do that?" Sometimes it's a result of the shooting setup, but in some cases its in the post-shot editing.
For the latter cases, Adobe is unveiling new tutorials in its mobile apps and richer contextual help in the desktop flavors of Lightroom. According to product manager Josh Haftel, the No. 1 request from users was for help on how to do more with their photos and get more in-app learning.
"We're building it to be community oriented and dynamic, [and] want to inspire people of all skill levels," Haftel added. Contributors so far include pro photographers Matt Kloskowski, Katrin Eismann, Kristina Sherk, Terry White, and Nicole Young.
The new help feature shows users the exact edit slider positions that prominent photographers used when adjusting an image. These tools will appear first in the mobile versions of Lightroom and later on the desktop.
The new inspiration feature figures prominently in the mobile versions of Lightroom, but will also show up in an expanded help feature in the desktop applications. When I asked Haftel if Lightroom would finally include full local help, he was somewhat noncommittal about the "full" part. Until now, getting help for most Adobe software involves being sent to the web and hoping that the info is about the product you're using and from a reliable, up-to-date source.
A New Sharing Option
The Share & Invite menu now lets you invite collaborators via email, who can add their own photos to your albums. You can also make the album only visible to those you invite, as opposed to the previous versions which made any share link work for anyone with the link.
This feature is only rolling out to the mobile and lightweight CC versions of Lightroom. The mobile apps will also get batch editing, letting them apply edits to multiple photos all at once.
Recommended by Our Editors
The Texture Slider
This is the first new editing slider to appear in Lightroom since 2015, when Adobe added the Dehaze slider. According to Haftel, the new Texture slider lets you "address details to either accentuate or smooth out details in the middle frequencies." It's the first Lightroom tool that's concerned with spatial frequency, or image transitions from one detail to the next. In practical terms, it means you can sharpen a face without, for example, revealing skin pores. Other areas with middle frequencies include hair, bark, and stone texture.
Another type of image in which you'd use the tool is for photos with bokeh, where you don't want to sharpen edges in the blurred background. In preliminary tests of the tool, I found that it actually did sharpen bokeh and blurred pores, but I did find cases where gentle use of it improved the image. It's available as a local brush adjustment as well as a global slider.
Defringe and More
Lightroom Classic has an excellent tool for when the Remove Chromatic Aberration doesn't actually remove all the edge discoloration. You use a small color dropper to isolate the fringe color, and then Lightroom very effectively removes it:
A similar tool is now coming to Lightroom CC. The new tool is accessed from a button in the Optics control group. With it, you can either use a dropper or choose a color shade (purple or green) from a slider control. In preliminary testing, the tool also did an excellent job.
Finally, Lightroom Classic gets a new Flat-Field Correction tool. This is intended to "correct for sensor and lens characteristics that can result in asymmetrical color casts." It requires you to shoot a calibration image with the same settings as a normal photo, import both, and then it creates a new DNG file with the distortions removed.