In my last post, I talked about what keyboard solutions I had tried before writing LRKeys.
I started looking for a keyboard solution for Windows PCs which did not rely on hijacking the mouse pointer, and couldn’t find one. So last winter, in the off-season for weddings, I started putting my own solution together. My first prototype relied on reverse-engineering the control ids of each slider – better than using the mouse pointer, but still prone to error. Still, it gave me a usable app which I then used all the following summer to do my editing. Bliss! But still not up to a standard to put before the world of pro photographers.
So this off-season, I’ve re-implemented it using the Lightroom SDK API. On the one hand, this makes it a little more complex, as you need both a Windows app and a Lightroom plugin. But the plugin is as simple as can be for the end user – it installs automatically, and just needs to be started manually when you start Lightroom, and I even managed to map that to a keyboard shortcut. And the whole thing is much more robust and future-proof.
LRKeys Basic is now out the door. It is available as a free download from the website on 21-day trial. LRKeys Basic is not a configurable keyboard solution, but the keyboard layout is the one I have found most intuitive, and it includes all the sliders I use the most. Give it a go and see what a difference it makes.
LRKeys Pro is still being developed at the moment. It will add configurable keyboard shortcuts. Not only that, it will add hundreds of actions. And not only that, you will be able to allocate multiple actions to a single key. Is this the much sought-after relative develop presets? It could be! Sign up for updates via email or Facebook Messenger to be the first to hear about the LRKeys Pro releases. You may even want to be a Beta tester. I know I would 🙂