If your photography workflow includes using Lightroom, you may wanna take a close look at Paddy For Lightroom an open source DIYish method of assigning keys to Lightroom actions and sliders.(We featured a similar concept before for GIMP, however this one is way, way more flexible)
The neat thing about Paddy for Lightroom is that it can be connected to almost any external input device including “standard” Genovation keyboards, external cashier keyboards, Midi controllers, well you name it. This means that you can map keys to do your some of your tedious work for you.
Paddy (I’m gonna call it Paddy for shorts) started out as a side project for the mysterious Dorfl a hobbyist programmer. It is based on another popular open source key swapping engine – autohotkey. If you’ve ever wondered why open source rocks, there you have it! I love open source too.
You can use it for free and assign keyboard short cuts, but the fun begins once you start adding external devices, (and those can be as cheap as $70 for 46 keys). Or, or….. you can hook it up with a midi controller and move real (YES REAL!) sliders to make your adjustments and watch them move back when you make adjustments in Lightroom. Like in the video below.
The key features of Paddy include
- Map any LR function to any key or key combination
- Use external keyboards without losing key functionality
- Write Scripts for Lightroom
- Apply Presets, camera profiles, brush presets and Paddy relative Presets on the push of a key
- Move most sliders with keys by amounts you can define
As with any open source project Dorfl accepts contributions, discussion and comments on the project page.
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