Two active independent projects for both the Mac and Windows were unearthed this morning. Knobroom & Paddy seek to improve your workflow by allowing us to use MIDI-controllers to manipulate image settings.
Knobroom: Direct manipulation add-on for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
Main motivation for developing Knobroom is improving ergonomics, which in the end will improve your creative workflow. Sliders are quickly accessible and easily adjustable without causing mouse-related injuries or stress on your wrist.
Paddy: A free Windows-only workflow improvement program for Lightroom.
With full support for Lighroom 3’s scripting engine, Paddy radically improves the workflow 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.
This strikes me in awe as I have been projecting the same need personally — whenever I’m on LR. A different kind of longing surface whenever I use Aperture — responsiveness & screen real estate.
Aperture’s UI makes me feel at home, its controllers are brilliantly designed and rendered on-screen beautifully, but its reaction to my input are often delayed — not by inaccurate input — but by the lack of speed from the machine I’m running it on.
Perhaps it’s time for me to get those Mac Pros, or get more RAMs.
(via John Nack, Vincent Verdet)