LRKeys has been created to address one of the (few) shortcomings in Adobe Lightroom – the ability to use custom keyboard shortcuts to edit photos.
Unlike many other products, Lightroom doesn’t provide a way of redefining keyboard shortcuts, so you can’t even move around the existing shortcuts to suit your way of working. On top of that, the most used actions when editing photos don’t even have keyboard shortcuts at all. There is no keyboard mapping which takes you directly to increase or decrease values for exposure, highlights, temperature, or any of the other Basic Develop settings.
Sure, you can do it all with presets and the mouse. But it’s hardly an efficient process when you are editing hundreds of photos from a wedding.
Over the years, I’ve tried out various solutions to this problem, but I’ve never found one which I loved. I am a Windows PC user, so it has been significantly harder to find a solution than it seems to be for Mac users.
I got hold of a MIDI controller (the Korg nonoKNTRL2) and hooked it up to Paddy. It was fun to use, but I found it fiddly. A larger controller might have fixed that, but then it would have got in the way even more when I wasn’t using it. Plus I still ended up looking from screen to controller and back again all the time, which I found tiring.
I then tried Motibodo, which is a software-only solution. It gives you all the key develop sliders as keyboard shortcuts. I got on much better with this. But I found the layout really not intuitive. And despite the fact the developer had redefined the layout, he didn’t let me take control of it at all! Motibodo is not user-configurable. It has some fussy requirements about the screen view being just so, which seemed odd. And I noticed that the mouse pointer ended up on top of the slider associated with the Motibodo key each time, rather than being returned to where it had started, which was hugely annoying.
So that’s where the journey started. In the next post, I’ll say something about how I created LRKeys.