Adobe Lightroom update adds built-in tutorials and a texture slider to the app

Adobe Lightroom has some new editing features, including its first new slider in years, Texture, which changes medium-sized objects and leaves detailed ones. But the software also gets in-app tutorials, a promising first foray into the larger user community.

Tutorials will appear in a new Home view, which also contains “inspirational photos” and a user’s recent photos. The reorganization of the user interface, combined with professional help, seems to be the first step toward creating a more social and community-based space in Lightroom.

The above features aren't available on all platforms at the same time; they're coming to iOS and Android today, then to the desktop. Mac and Windows users get their own UI with a new Help menu icon ("circled?") to look up tips, as well as six built-in tutorials to help users keep up with the new ones that will be added.

But before we start, here are the new editing tools.

Texture and more

The big addition to editing is the new Texture slider, designed to help “accentuate or soften” medium-sized details, such as skin or hair, without affecting smaller ones, such as pores or follicles. This allows users to map large areas without affecting noise or bokeh.

Best of all, it’s designed to work in coordination with other sliders like Clarity and Dehaze, allowing users to adjust one while leaving the others alone. Texture is coming to all Lightroom platforms.

Lightroom on desktop gets a new tool, Defringe, that removes purple or green fringing captured by lens chromatic aberrations, while the Android version finally gets batch editing and Lightroom Classic uses the Flat Field Correction tool as a native tool.

Finally, desktop, mobile, and ChromeOS users can now invite others to add photos to their albums. Best of all, they won't need Lightroom subscriptions to add their images.

Unlike videos that illustrate tricks from one version of Lightroom, adding tutorials directly to the software's code means they're timeless and work with all future versions.

Tutorials are a great addition for Lightroom users who want advice from experienced photographers in a tutorial. Unfortunately, they won't be uploaded to YouTube, but Adobe says it's a plus to integrate them directly into the software (i.e., make them only available to Lightroom subscribers).

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(Image: © Adobe)

Unlike videos that illustrate a single version of Lightroom, locked in time, adding “coding-only” tutorials to software code means they’re timeless: the instructions will always point to the correct functionality, no matter where they’re reorganized. They appear in different locations between mobile, tablet, and desktop versions. Plus, code-level and text-level tutorials are much easier to translate into different languages.

Adobe is starting off with a curated list of 60 videos made by professional photographers like Matt Kloskowski, Katrin Eismann, and Kristina Sherk, with more to come on a regular basis. All tutorials will be available to Lightroom users at no additional cost.

But in the future, Adobe plans to let any user download its tutorials so other Lightroom users can view and enjoy them. The company hasn't explained how it might change the user interface to encourage viewing and sharing tutorials, but it does open the door to some sort of self-review system (upvoting, etc.) to bring up the most popular solutions.

The company has also not suggested how it might attract professionals, who can monetize their tutorials on other content hosting platforms, to this nascent subscription-based software. This could mean that Adobe plans to help creators monetize their tutorials (you can share external links by clicking on them), but if they have ideas, the company is not sharing them.