This article is a bit off the typical path for DJ Techtools, but we promise that Adobe Lightroom MIDI control is an interesting concept for anyone who has loads of DJ gear. See how it’s possible with Knobroom, an app that takes advantage of Adobe’s API in Lightroom.
Fast Photo Editing In Lightroom With MIDI
This video by Eric Cheng showed up in a YouTube search for Midi Fighter Twister videos just a few days ago – and it is pretty awesome. The video shows how Eric has the Twister mapped to control exposure, contrast, color temperature, highlight/shadow levels, and pretty much every single photo editing option for a single photo in Lightroom.
The great part about this is that it takes an arduous process that is usually done with a mouse (dragging the same sliders on every single value for each photo) and moves it entirely over to a dedicated control surface. For a lot of creative professionals, controllerism hasn’t seen the same surge that the music technology industry has, so there’s not a lot of options for non-point-and-click control.
How To Enable Lightroom MIDI Control
Eric was nice enough to not only create a demo video, but he also made a second video showing exactly how to set up Knobroom with the Midi Fighter Twister. To get to the good stuff (and beyond the core concept) skip forward to 0:50 in the video.
Knobroom is a free download as a shareware plugin for Adobe Lightroom 4 or later – and works on both Windows and Mac. There’s a bit of a lag on older versions of Lightroom, which has been addressed in the new Lightroom 6 API that came out earlier this year.
Here’s hoping that the CaptureMonkey team behind Knobroom sees a lot of time-saving potential for their app – and thinks about trying to tackle the same challenge for some of Adobe’s other applications, which are full of repetitive tasks that could really use some MIDI control.
Know of any other boring computer tasks that controllers would really help with? Share your ideas in the comments.
