Philips Hue now lets you designate which lights do what for better lighting scenes

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Philips Hue scenes are getting more useful for people with different types of smart lighting in the same room. As reported by smart lighting publication Hueblog, a recent update to the Hue app lets you specify how individual lights are used in a space: for tasks or for ambiance. Your selection will inform the color and brightness of each light, helping them better serve their intended purposes.

Hue's scenes automatically apply coordinated colors to compatible bulbs throughout a room. But prior to this update, those colors seemed to be applied at random, limiting how practical scenes were in a lot of contexts. For example, a scene could automatically set a color-changing bulb in a reading lamp to a color that makes reading more difficult, or set mood lighting like Hue's Signe lamps to more neutral colors that don't add much to the ambiance.

Now, after updating the Hue app to version 5.19, users are able to designate which lights are for tasks and which are for ambiance, which should help better assign appropriate colors to each light in a room. Hueblog's reporting suggests that some lights (like Hue's Ensis pendant light) automatically apply the right designation, but we haven't been able to test that ourselves.

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The update won't automatically make your scenes more functional. Instead, it adds the ability to designate what a light's function is in that light's settings: For decoration, For tasks, or Mixed. Decorative lights will skew toward more vibrant, less functional colors, while task lights will opt for more neutral tones. Mixed-use lights will be assigned a random color within a scene's parameters.

After adjusting the new setting for your lights, any newly assigned scenes will take your preferences into account. Hueblog notes that existing scenes won't be adjusted, so you may need to reconfigure your scenes to make full use of this update.

Version 5.19 of the Philips Hue app is available on the Play Store now.

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