What's New in Rethink: Glow and Depth Masks for Lightroom Classic 16

Adobe just released Lightroom Classic 16, and two of its new tools, Glow and depth masks, let me rebuild some of my favorite Rethink tools. This update brings those changes to your toolkit, adds two new tools, and introduces the Rethink Panel, a new way to work with the toolkit right beside Lightroom Classic.

Looking for the full story of the Rethink app? See What's New in Rethink 2.0. New to Rethink? Start here.

The Toolkit

Glow: softer, more natural light

Lightroom Classic 16 adds a real Glow adjustment. Before, a glow had to be faked with negative Clarity and Texture, which muddied detail and shifted contrast. Now the light itself blooms. I rebuilt thirteen tools around it:

  • Orton Effect, Orton Effect - Retain Details and Orton Effect - Sky. The classic Orton look, with far cleaner detail underneath.
  • Glow, Warm Glow, Luminous Glow, Twilight Glow and Desert Glow. Each one tuned for a different kind of light.
  • Light Bleed and Sunbeams. Light that spills from a bright source now looks like light instead of haze.
  • Sky Glow, Ethereal Effect and Painterly Effect.

Depth masks: one slider from foreground to background

Lightroom Classic 16 can also select by depth. Instead of drawing a gradient or painting a selection, you move a slider to decide how far into the scene an adjustment reaches. Six tools now use it, and they're marked with ⇅ in their names:

  • Foreground, Midground and Background (Selections). Clean depth selections to build your own adjustments on.
  • Foreground Enhance. Adds presence to the nearest part of the scene.
  • Remove Background Haze and Atmospheric Perspective. Haze lives in the distance, so these now follow the depth of the scene rather than a straight line across the frame.

Two new tools

  • ⚖️ Balance Tones (Tonal Adjustments). Adjusts highlights and shadows separately, each with its own amount, so you can bring a high-contrast scene together without flattening it.
  • 🎯 Quiet Edges (Effects). Calms the edges of the frame so they pull less attention and the eye stays on your subject.

Tonal Adjustments, reorganized

Balance Tones and Vignette now sit near the top of Tonal Adjustments, with the rest of the group moving down one step. Two brushes are gone: Midtone Contrast and Desaturate Over-Saturated Colors. I found that it's most common to apply these globally, then remove from areas the effect is not desired rather than painting in to specific areas, along with the similar tools causing confusion.

A heads up about Favorites

Lightroom keeps a favorite by the preset's name. Because the tools in Tonal Adjustments moved, and the depth tools gained ⇅ in their names, about two dozen presets have new names, and those will drop out of your Favorites. Just star them again. Everything else keeps its favorite as usual.

The Rethink Panel

This is the biggest change to how I work in Lightroom since I started building these tools. The Rethink Panel sits beside Lightroom Classic and lets you use the whole toolkit in a much simpler way. When you pick a tool, you don't have to hunt for it in the Masking panel or switch between the Basic panel and the Tone Curve. The sliders you need are right in front of you.

The panel is included with the Rethink Landscape Toolkit. It works with Lightroom Classic only, not with Camera Raw in Photoshop or with Lightroom Desktop, but the updated presets still work there.

Working with the panel

  • Find any tool by name and apply it to the photo you have selected.
  • Sliders follow Lightroom. Change something in Lightroom and the panel keeps up. Double-click a slider to reset it.
  • Keyboard shortcuts and its own undo, step by step, so you can back out of a change without leaving the panel.
  • See the mask while you work. Drag a masking slider and Lightroom shows its black-and-white mask, so you see exactly where the adjustment lands.
  • Hide the tools you never use with a right-click, and bring them back any time.
  • Zoom with Z. If you tick Focus Points in Lightroom Classic 16's Develop toolbar, the zoom goes straight to where your camera focused.
  • Open the matching lesson for any tool, right from the panel by right-clicking on the tool.

Sharpening for web and print

Lightroom's export options have always been limiting for sharpening. If you find yourself going to Photoshop just to sharpen, the panel has its own sharpening for both web and print.

  • For the web, it uses advanced techniques to make images look sharper online. It includes preset sizes for social media, and it can add a border or a blurred background so your photo fits Instagram's shapes without cropping. Along with HDR exports for photos you've edited in HDR.
  • For print, you can finally see what the sharpening will do before the print comes out. Choose your paper (glossy, luster, matte or canvas) and how far away the print will be viewed, then preview it as it will look on paper, side by side with what Lightroom would have done. If you're unsure how much to use, it makes a test strip at several strengths so you can print one sheet and choose before printing the real thing.

Plan your edits

In the darkroom, photographers made a work print and marked it up first, to previsualize what needed to change so they could direct the eye and improve the image overall. I felt that was missing from the digital darkroom, so I built a digital version. The Plan sheet lets you mark up your photo before you touch a slider. It makes you slow down and think about which elements really matter and which are distracting.

Understand your edits

Rethink has never been only about getting to a result quickly. It's also about understanding your edits, so you make better decisions and more powerful images. The panel is starting to help with that:

  • Tone view. Above the tone sliders, the panel shows your photo and its histogram, and as you work a slider it lights up exactly which tones that slider moves.
  • Zones. A map of where the tones of your photo sit, from deep shadow to bright highlight.
  • Style Launch hints. When you choose a starting point, the panel reads your photo's histogram and tells you how much dynamic range you're working with.

I plan to add many more features like this as the panel grows, because I want Rethink to be as much a learning system as an editing system.

Turn on the panel in Labs

The panel is new, so it lives in Labs while I keep refining it. To try it:

  1. Go to the Manage tab in the Rethink app. Toward the bottom you'll find the Labs section. Turn on the Rethink Panel.
  2. Quit and reopen Lightroom Classic once, so it loads the panel's plug-in.
  3. In Lightroom, go to Develop and select a photo, then click the Panel button at the top of the Rethink app.

It's still a beta, so expect a few rough edges. It can move your Lightroom window (you can turn that off in its settings), and it saves exports to a Rethink folder on your Desktop. If something doesn't work, or you have an idea, click the speech-bubble button at the top of the panel and it comes straight to me.

How to update

  1. Update Lightroom Classic to version 16 from the Creative Cloud app. If you use Camera Raw in Photoshop, update it too.
  2. Open the Rethink app and accept the app update.
  3. Press Update on your toolkit, then reopen Lightroom.

Not ready for Lightroom Classic 16? Nothing breaks. Glow and depth masks need version 16, so Rethink keeps you on your current presets until you update Lightroom, then offers the new ones.

Using Lightroom Desktop (the cloud version)? Lightroom Desktop won't replace presets it already has. Delete the Rethink preset groups there first, then import again from the app, or you'll keep the old copies.

Don't have the app yet? Download Rethink for Mac or Windows and sign in with the email you used to buy.