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Knobroom is a plugin for Adobe Lightroom that lets you adjust the various photo-editing tools with a hardware MIDI controller.
I'll be honest. The reason I started writing this post was the name, Knobroom, for obvious reasons. But while I came for the schoolboy humor, I stayed for the immensely practical hack.
Knobroom lets you plug a USB MIDI controller into your computer and then use all of the knobs and sliders to directly control the knobs and slider in the Lightroom RAW photo-editing app. For a busy photographer, this is huge: Instead of mousing around from control to control, you can just twiddle knobs and sliders and quickly adjust brightness, contrast, white balance and pretty much anything else you need to tweak.
Pro photographer Max Edin took the setup for a spin, and he says it saves him a huge amount of time. It's not all upside, though. Even with this hardwired solution, Max says that Lightroom is often jerky when making adjustments, making it hard to judge precise tweaks. And the ability to control multiple adjustments at once makes it even worse.
If you don't want to go out and buy a MIDI controller just to check this out, you might like to try LRPAD instead. This combination of app and plugin, first seen by Gadget Lab in March of this year, uses your iPad as a multitouch controller for Lightroom. It costs $10.
Knobroom product page [Knobroom via PetaPixel]
Using hardware controllers with Lightroom and the Knobroom plugin [Max Edin]
