No, not an Irish dude, but rather this open-source project: “Paddy radically improves the workflow in Lightroom 3.0 by allowing you assign any adjustment setting – including moving the sliders and applying a preset – to essentially any key, your number keypad, external keypads, and MIDI controller knobs and sliders.”
Interesting stuff. Let us know if you give it a whirl and have feedback. [Via Adolfo Rozenfeld]
An interesting opportunity for the convergence of cinema style color grading control surfaces within a still images environment. could be kinda cool.
Terrific! I think this would be even better if LR had actual color wheels to navigate while performing color adjustment (in addition to split toning controls). This kind of physical extension is great for those.
This is great! This is what I want on my ipad a virtual slider interface with lightroom control. Looks great.
Using physical controls rather than a mouse is really nice. I have a Faderfox DJ2 controller for Traktor Pro which meant I could replace 40kg of DJ kit with my laptop, a sound card and a controller so small [and still very ergonomic] that I could fit 3 on my laptop in front of screen.
This model http://www.faderfox.de/mark/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=149&Itemid=174
would probably be best for LR and it now has a USB connector instead of a MIDI lead, which is better as no sound card is needed and is bus powered too.
@Jon Adams: Air DIsplay allows for something quite like what you describe 🙂
Looks cool but alas Windows only, no Mac
I would love something like this as my hand/wrist gets cramped up from holding down the mouse button and making fine adjustments with the sliders in Lightroom/Photoshop/NIK software. What a bummer to find out it’s Windows only.
Remember a few weeks back when you asked us for ideas for a companion tablet device to photoshop? Well this thing is like half the idea some of us had.
We envision an open API that allows anyone to write software that can control the tools in photoshop. Then adobe, wacom, and one of the hundreds of yet-to-be-released-tablet companies can team up to make a tablet/wacom app & device that can be used with either just your fingers (for slider manipultion) or with a pressure sensitive wacom pen.
With the touch capabilities of the device, the jog wheel on the intuous 4 would not be needed. The app for controlling photoshop could be open sourced allowing other developers and hardware manufacturers to offer better or lesser devices at a wide array of price points.
I’d be most likely to buy an affordable linux based tablet with intuous 3 level wacom technology and a very cheap black and white screen. (I’m Poor). Meanwhile my one armed friend would want to run the app on his 1st gen iPad and just control tool selection, brush size, layer ordering, and opacity by touching the ipad with his feet while using his one good arm with his intuous 4
The api to control photoshop should be open and powerful enough to allow anyone to write their own app to work with it.
And people with more powerful tablet devices could probably run a VNC app and have an almost Cintiq experience. But then they’d have to keep switching between the photoshop-controll app and the vnc app.
it seems to me the exciting thing about having physical faders/controls for LR (or Photoshop or anything else) is that you can operate them without looking away from the screen. I’m sure after you’ve used that midi control for an hour or two you can do it without looking.
replicating the same remote sliders functionality on an iPad (or any other touch screen device) fails instantly because you have to look at the device to make sure you’re picking the right virtual fader.
or may be not, it’d be interesting to try anyway.
alexkent.
The main point I was trying to make is that Adobe should be actively involved in providing this guy with whatever he needs to make this idea work perfectly, then they should hook up with some hardwar manufacturers and do something like this themselves while also making it open enough for other hackers/inventors to build more devices on top of it. Whether they be mixing boards, wii remotes, or tablet apps.
Sounds like Paddy + TouchOSC on the iPad might work well, though I haven’t tried it.
The Idea = Fantastic
Windows Only = Not So Fantastic 🙁
Anyone know if there are any plans to port it to OSX as well? I would love to try mapping my Akai for this….
Hi folks, dorfl here, key contact for Paddy (at the moment). Thanks for the post. A few comments.
1. “Sounds like Paddy + TouchOSC on the iPad might work well, though I haven’t tried it.” We have a user on the boards who is working out the settings. yes, it seems to work. Check out https://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/paddy/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=175
2. “Windows Only = Not So Fantastic :(“- what can I say, it’s a hobby. I don’t have a MAC, and what we do here depends heavily on the way windows works. Yeah, I would love to have a MAC but I suspect he way we plug in here (via the Windows API, not the LR API) would be hard to replicate in OSx. I hope it inspires the professionals to get better. In the meantime, Knobroom is cross platform and highly recommended for Midi use, but does not have macros, relative presets, and keyboard mapping, which Paddy has
3. It’s pretty clear that a cross-platform implementation of something like this requires a better API that what LR has at the moment. The LUA scripting language was not made for real-time adjustments. What can I say, pressure Adobe.
Please let me know via the Paddy boards if you have ideas and questions. We are openj source, open opinion 🙂
Dorfl