What's New in Rethink 2.0

Rethink 2.0 is everything I've shipped since v1.1, and it comes in two parts: a sharper, better-organized toolkit, and a brand-new desktop app that changes how you install it, learn with it, and get help from me. Sign in to the app with your purchase email and it unlocks everything you own.

New to Rethink? Start here.

The Toolkit

New tools

  • 🌶️ Visualize Hot Pixels (Core Prep). Instantly reveal stuck sensor pixels so you can remove them before they show up in a print.
  • Crop (Core Prep). Cropping now has its own place early in the workflow, where the decision belongs.
  • ♨️ Add Warmth 🖌️ (Color Adjustments). A new brush for painting warmth exactly where you want it, instead of warming the whole frame.

I wanted printing to be approachable for everyone, so the toolkit now includes a dedicated 🖨️ Print Prep group: seven presets in the order you'd use them when an image is headed to the printer.

  • 📎 Detail Clipping Warnings. See exactly what will block up or blow out on paper.
  • ☀️ Print Brighten. Compensate for how much darker a print reads than your screen.
  • ✨ Prep for Gloss / 📄 Prep for Matte. Tune contrast and depth for your paper stock.
  • 🛡️ Protect Highlights. Pull fragile highlight detail inside what the printer can hold.
  • 💧 Desaturate Deep Shadows. Keep dense shadows from clogging with ink.
  • 🎯 Bring Into Gamut 🖌️. A brush to bring colors a printer can't reproduce back into range.

It installs automatically alongside your toolkit and lives in its own group. It's not step 8. It's the group you reach for when you're ready to print.

Linear, without the downloads

The 📏 Linear starting points now begin from the new Rethink Linear camera profile, which the Rethink app creates for your cameras automatically. No more downloading linear profile packs. The app builds a profile for every camera Adobe provides profiles for, which covers nearly everything, and falls back sensibly for the rare exceptions. And unlike other linear profiles, these open at normal brightness instead of nearly black.

Reorganized: global first, local last

Tonal Adjustments and Color Adjustments have both been reordered to match the workflow I teach: global adjustments first, then work your way toward local ones. The sky tools now sit together, the Lighten and Darken families sit together, and the brushes are at the bottom, since painting local adjustments is the last thing you do. Lighten Background and Darken Background also moved from Effects into Tonal Adjustments, where you'd actually look for them.

Burn & Dodge are now Lighten & Darken

The old darkroom terms are cool, but if you never worked in a darkroom they're just confusing, and there's no good reason to hang on to them. The names now say exactly what the tools do. Many of the targeted Lighten and Darken tools were also rebuilt to hold up across more challenging images.

Cleaner starting points

The 🚀 Style Launch presets no longer carry hidden changes to the RGB point curves. Before, opening the Curve panel meant editing on top of shapes you didn't put there. Now each preset lands in the same place through the Basic panel and parametric curve, sliders you can see and move, and the point curve is yours from the start.

Smaller refinements

  • Less clutter. The Resources & Learning group is gone: nine presets whose only job was printing web addresses. The app puts all of it one click away, always current.
  • The Zone System has moved out. It belongs in the future Monochrome toolkit. If you still use it, you can download it separately [link].

Updates no longer break your Favorites

Behind the scenes, every preset now keeps a stable identity from version to version, so updating the toolkit no longer clears the Lightroom Favorites you've built up. The only thing that clears a favorite is an actual rename, and the release notes always call those out.

The Rethink App

That's the toolkit. Now for the really big upgrade: the Rethink app, free with your toolkit, for Mac and Windows.

Your toolkit installs itself

  • One-click install and updates. No more hunting for zip files or deleting old presets by hand. The app installs your toolkit into Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw, and updates it in place when a new version ships.
  • You'll always know what changed. After every update, a "What's new" card shows you that version's release notes, with the full history one click away.
  • Linear camera profiles install themselves for every camera in your Lightroom catalogs. When a new camera shows up later, the app quietly adds its profile too.

The course, inside the app

The full video course now plays right in the app. How much is unlocked depends on what you own: toolkit owners get the foundation lessons that teach the tools, and course owners get everything.

  • Every lesson plays right in the app, with your progress tracked. Open the course and it resumes the lesson you were on, at your saved spot.
  • Search finds any lesson or specific tool in a few keystrokes.
  • Download lessons for offline. Save a single lesson or a whole module and watch on the plane or in the field. Your notes and progress sync when you're back.

Learn on my raw files

  • Practice files, one click. Each lesson lists the actual raw files I edit on screen, as downsampled raw DNGs. Click one and the new Lightroom plugin drops it into your catalog, in that lesson's collection, open in Develop. When you're done with the course, one click cleans them all out again.

Notes and answers that stay with the lesson

  • Timestamped notes. Jot a note on any lesson and it's saved with the exact moment in the video, ready when you come back. Notes are private. Only you see them.
  • Ask me, right on the lesson. Your question goes out with the exact timestamp you're watching, and answers I publish appear under the video, for you and for everyone who has the same question later.

For workshop clients: help on your own photos

If you join one of our workshops, the app adds a few things built for our time together.

  • Send me the actual photo. When you're stuck, attach the photo you have open in Lightroom right from the app. Your settings travel with it, so I see exactly what you see.
  • One-click sharing during workshops. Upload the image you're working on straight from Lightroom for group sharing and discussion. No exporting, no emailing files around.
  • Critique uploads with a full round trip. Send your raw file with a critique request. When I work on it, my changes come back into your Lightroom, applied to a virtual copy right next to your own edit. Nothing you've done is touched, and you can study exactly what I did on your own file, slider by slider.

Take care of your setup

  • Back up everything. Your Lightroom settings and presets, Camera Raw, and your Photoshop settings, backed up in one pass and restored on a new computer just as easily.
  • Tune Lightroom for speed. The app analyzes your system, tells you whether your machine is set up well for Lightroom, and applies the recommended performance settings for you, with one-click revert if you change your mind.

The small things that add up

  • A notification bell brings announcements, answers to your questions, and replies about your photos right into the app, with a gentle desktop notification when something new arrives.
  • Two looks. Darkroom (dark, warm, easy on the eyes) and Gallery (light, on warm paper). The app follows your computer's appearance automatically, or pick one yourself.
  • Using Lightroom (the cloud version)? The app now walks you through the import path step by step, including updates, which cloud Lightroom otherwise skips silently.

Bonus tools, included with your toolkit

  • Aspect Ratios. Quickly try a variety of aspect ratios and crops in the Print module. Not for printing, for fast experimentation.
  • Borders. Add a clean white border to a JPG on export.
  • Triptych. Lay out three images as a single bordered JPG, ready to share.
  • Export Presets. A dozen presets covering the settings you actually need for social media, web, and print.

Each one comes with a "Watch how to use" link that opens its lesson in the course.

Get started

Download the Rethink app for Mac or Windows

Sign in with the email you used to buy, and the app unlocks everything you own. Setup takes about five minutes, and the wizard backs up your Lightroom Favorites before it touches anything.