Using a MIDI Lightroom controller

- This week on the Practicing Photographer, we're going to look at a very different way of controlling Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. If you're a Lightroom user, you should probably already be very familiar and comfortable with all of our editing controls over here. We got a series of sliders and buttons and dials and curve controls and things, and they work great. And I really like these controls, as I've said before. I think this set of sliders right here, the basic tone sliders in Lightroom, is the best combination of editing controls that anyone has yet to come up with for working with raw files, or any other type of image for that matter.

But when you're driving it with a mouse all day, well, your hands can start to hurt like crazy, at least mine does, but also, you may get a little sluggish as you continue editing and so what I've got here is a MIDI controller that has been set up to work with Lightroom. MIDI is Musical Instrument Digital Interface. This is normally a controller that would be used to drive synthesizers or mixers or whatnot, but this company called Pusher Labs has created something called PFIXER, and this is a Behringer BCF2000 MIDI console with some special software that's all set up to drive Lightroom, and they put these nice overlays on it so that all of my buttons and dials here are actually labeled correctly for Lightroom.

So if you're wondering why in the world I would want this, let me just dive in and show you. I'm here in Lightroom, I've got some images pulled up here, I'm going to start a normal editing process. I look at this image, I look at the histogram, the first thing I think is the white balance is a little off. Normally, I would come, mouse up here to the temperature and tint sliders and work with those to adjust the color, to pull some of that red out. Instead, I'm just going to go up here to my temperature and tint knobs and turn them with my fingers. It's great. I can just dial the temperature down there and there, I've pulled some red out of that.

I could mess with the tint. I don't think I need to. The rest of my sliders down here, the normal basic editing sliders, are mapped onto the sliders right here. A quick look at my histogram shows that my right end is messed up, so I'm going to pull the whites down, which I can do just by dragging the slider down. And now I'm thinking maybe I'm going to pull the highlights down instead and push the whites back up. I didn't quite do that right. I need maybe some more detail out of the shadows so I'm going to push my shadows up to get some more data into the middle of the histogram, where I can use my contrast slider to spread it out.

I know that because this is a raw file, it neit's some sharpening, so I'm going to throw a little bit of clarity in, which is going to increase some contrast. And as I do that, I'm coming to the end here, I think these shadows up here, or this fog up here looks a little blue, I think that's a white balance issue, so I'm just going to turn my white balance knob to put a little warmth back in. With that done, I'm ready to move on to my next image. Now this is where it gets really cool. Normally, when you go from one image in Lightroom to another, all of the sliders over here update to show you the settings for that image.

This board does the same thing. I'm going to hit the next image button here, it goes to the next image and all my sliders just moved back to the normal position. So now I can just jump right in and start editing this image. So I'm going through all the same perfectly normal workflow that I would normally do in Lightroom, it's just I'm using these analog controls to drive everything. And I'm getting a few different things here. One, I'm getting my hand off the mouse. And after years and years of working with a computer, my hands are pretty messed up because of the mouse so I'm loving this.

I'm not doing any clinching or any of the other things that happen when I use a mouse that make my hands hurt. Go on to next image. So I've got my hands off the mouse, I'm having a much, much easier time on my hands, but I'm also finding I can work pretty quickly here. I think it's going to go faster as I get a better handle on where everything is. I realize that I'm really used to mapping, kind of in my head spatially, how these different controls relate to different parts of the histogram. It's hard to explain, I need to get my head around that a little bit, but I think that will come.

I think that this is a way that I can work very, very quickly once I've gotten used to it. And again, as I move around, my sliders are constantly adjusting. Pusher Labs has done a great job of mapping pretty much everything that you would use in a basic editing session on to this console. Now obviously, I can't do brushstrokes and things like that but I can get my brushstrokes configured and whatnot and then just jump over to it if I had a tablet or something like that, jump over to there.

And so I have a couple of different mouse-free ways of working. What's also nice is they've paid attention to a lot of the other kind of utility functions that I want to have while I'm editing. In addition to these basic controls here, I also have a couple different modes I can put the board in. I'm in the basic editing mode right now, or I'm sorry, the basic editing mode right now. I'm going to go over to editing, which now gives me access to a whole new bank of controls that I didn't have before.

I'm going to tell it that I want to edit this in Photoshop, which I can do with a single button push. And now it's starting the round-trip process into Photoshop. So here I am in Photoshop, I'm just going to drop in and quickly fix the contrast here on the ground. It looks a little flat. Now I don't have control of Photoshop with this board. It might be possible to set that up. I haven't really looked into that yet. The thing is, all this board is doing is sending key commands. It's just mapping keyboard shortcuts onto all of these different controls that I have here.

So anything that's drivable on my computer with a keyboard shortcut can be driven from this board. So in theory, I could come through and build a map that would allow me to drive Photoshop. I say in theory because I haven't been working with this for that long, and I don't know if that's very possible. A quick glance through the manual gives me an idea that setting that up would be pretty complicated. They've mapped hundreds and hundreds of various parameters using their software, which is very intuitive, it just looks like it would be a lot of work to go through and think about everything that you wanted to do and get it all set up appropriately.

Now I'm back in Lightroom, and my board has reset to zero because I'm no longer editing the file that I was editing before. I'm now looking at that TIF file that Lightroom sent off to Photoshop. If you understand Lightroom's round-trip process to Photoshop, that should make sense. I think I want to convert this to a black and white so I'm going to hit my black and white button, which drops me into black and white. I can now hit this button over here, and all of these knobs up here change from my white balance controls that I had before to toning controls for black and white. I would like to change the tone of the grass there, which is green, so I'm going to turn the green knob, and the greens are going to get darker, or the greens are going to get lighter.

And now I can really get somewhere. Switch back to basic, and these knobs are back to the controls they were at before. There are lots and lots of things... Well, old habits. I'm using the arrow keys here. I don't have to use those primitive old arrow keys. I can use these keys over here, which have a much nicer feel. Like I said, there are a lot of cool utility functions here. I shot a bunch of pictures of my mom the other day, so she was sitting in the same chair through the whole thing. I think there's one set of edits that would probably be reasonable for all of these. So I'm going to just drop some edits on here that I like.

Pull that down a little bit. A little clarity in, drop in a vignette. All of my basic edits. Now what I would like to do is copy these and drop them on the other images. If you look down here, you can see thumbnails of a whole bunch of other shots I took at the same time. I've got a copy button here, I've got an enter button here, and now I can go over here and select the images to the right, hit paste and boom. That edit has been applied to all of those images. My sliders update. I'm really, really liking this thing.

It's not too pricey. The Pusher Labs site has pricing on both this piece of hardware and just the software. So if you've already got a MIDI controller of some kind, you might be able to get away with just buying their software, setting up some maps yourself. You can also simply buy this console on its own. As I said, this is a Behringer BCF2000. You can get the console on your own, maybe you can find a used one, maybe you've already got one. You can order just the overlay from them, install the software and get it all set up that way. So again, if you're heavy Lightroom user, this is the Pusher Labs PFIXER.

It's a great way to get your hands off the keyboard. In addition to freeing up your hands and giving you a really fast workflow, it puts an analog feel back into your digital post production. So if you're missing the hands-on quality of the darkroom, this is a way to get your hands back on something tactile and movable, and I'm really enjoying that. So again, if you do a lot of Lightroom editing, this thing is worth checking out.