Lightroom adjustment sliders are nice and all, but wouldn’t it be neat if fine adjustments could be made using our hands and physical sliders rather than a mouse and virtual ones? There’s an open source program called PADDY for Lightroom that allows you to map adjustment settings in Lightroom to external devices, including MIDI faders with sliders and knobs. Here’s the description:

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 keys, your number keypad, external keypads, or a MIDI controller. This gives you all editing (and some other) tools of Lightroom at the push of one button. You do not need the mouse any more to get to presets or to adjust the sliders.

The software is completely free and open source, and can be downloaded here. Sadly, it’s currently only available for Windows.



Here’s a video showing what it’s like to control Lightroom sliders with a Behringer BCF2000 B-Control Fader meant for music:

If you have a MIDI controller lying around you might want to give this a try.

PADDY for Lightroom (via DIYPhotography.net)

Image credit: Using Lightroom by Éole