j-nord said:Regardless of price, I cannot fathom the usefulness of this product unless you are trying to edit from your couch.
This is made for wedding photographers and high-volume editors. Think about what happens when you use a mouse to adjust a slider. You first move your eyes to the slider, then the pointer to hit the tiny slider. Then your eyes go back to the picture while you move the sister. Then (at least for me) your eyes go back and forth a few times to check on the value of the slider, and back to the image. Each time your eyes leave the image, they need to readjust, and you may miss the subtlety you were aiming for.
With a hardware interface, your eyes *never* leave the image. Muscle memory develops and you can fly through hundreds of images in much shorter time. Let's say the hardware saves you 15 seconds per image. If you have to edit 1000 images, then you just saved hours of your time. And your eye fatigue goes way down because you're not skipping all over the place looking for tiny sliders.
There have been many attempts at solutions over the years. I use a Logitech game pad with the keys mapped to Lightroom functions
hne said:Talys said:syder said:RayValdez360 said:This thing is seriously stupid especially for that price also if it is for people with muscle issues, it should be marketed that way.
Professional colourists, audio engineers etc predominantly use custom designed interfaces that cost 10x this because it speeds up their workflow and gives them more tactile control over the changes they're making.
If your time is money and using a dedicated interface saves you half an hour a day (which it will once you've learned to use it), it pays for itself in no time at all.
While I don't know much about this particular interface, the idea that building hardware interfaces is 'seriously stupid' is... well... lets just say pretty dumb.
No, I don't think that specialized hardware interfaces are dumb at all. I've bought plenty of all sorts, and by all standards, this one is really cheap.
However, in this case, I think that the dials and such add nothing, and if anything, would slow down the workflow. It is much slower to turn a dial to move a slider from left to right, than just sliding it, or even more accurately, just typing in "25" or using your mouse to choose a preset.
If I were to seriously critique an objection, I would say that I think that for a device like this, dials need to be marked so that far left is 0 and far right is 100%, and it should be easy to look at the dial, and know that you're at 75%, or +3.5EV or +2 Vibrance or whatever. They should work like ring USM, and not like STM
But this paradigm would not work Lightroom, because from one photo to the next, the dials need to (automatically) be reset to different positions. So in order to make that happen, every dial would need to be motorized, and that would make it way too expensive for the target audience.
Well, there is a thing called motorised sliders. The dials are commonly rotary encoders and some of the better devices (the Loupedeck doesn't seem to be one of them) use LEDs to show you where on the scale you are. You can also see the sliders move in Lightroom.
With the MIDI2LR you should be able to have motorised sliders move when you use your mouse to change things in LR, but Loupedeck writes that "Unfortunately, Loupedeck cannot get feedback from Lightroom".
If you've got dials and sliders, you can modify more than one parameter at a time, such as contrast and exposure or blacks and shadow that are not really independent. Much faster than going back and forth between sliders with your mouse.
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