Industrious photographer Ben Stewart has demonstrated an excellent way to edit photos in Adobe Lightroom: using a PS3 or PS4 wireless controller. The process, which Stewart explains in the video above, enables Lightroom users to quickly scroll through photos, select tools, and make image adjustments without ever touching their keyboard or mouse.
It quite literally turns curating and editing large photo shoots into a game, and once you get the hang of it, the technique has the potential to seriously speed up your workflow.
Stewart recently demo'd editing an image using a PS3 controller, which had been mapped to various Lightroom shortcuts, and he walks others through the process of setting up their own wireless controller system n the video. His process involves two pieces of software for Windows PCs, SCPToolkit and JoyToKey, though macOS users will need to use an alternative mapping application such as Joystick Mapper. And if, for some reason, you're not a big fan of PlayStation, you can use wireless controllers from other companies as well.
Well this *might* be useful if you could actually use the analog sticks to change the values of sliders. Now it's just basically a very limited wireless keyboard.
I can see the utility in this when I'm working on my laptop on my conch and my dog decides that I've done too much work and gets in my lap so I can't keep the laptop on my lap anymore and then can't reach the keys. I could use the PS3 controller and still get some stuff done without touching my laptop.
I don't even know how to make LR "quickly scroll through photos" etc. with the mouse. I'm on quad-core i7 with 16GB RAM and SM951 and LR still lags considerably for most operations, especially scrolling through photos (my photos are 42MP RAW, granted). From what I heard from a friend, with a fairly large library, LR lags even on a portable workstation, and CUDA doesn't particularly help.
This is why I've resorted to just using lightroom desktop as a way to upload photos to the creative cloud and work on then on my iPad. So much faster. Just hate the new design of the iPad app which doesn't allow for full screen editing anymore.
That's stupid. Why not simply use the available keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-something, Alt-something)? Those few you actually use should be easy enough to memorize. Those things are around ever since windowing systems became popular!
Great. Let's buy a PlayStation to do photo editing on light room with its controller thingy. Then we buy a Boeing 747, comes with free peanuts. Then we get married for sex.
The thing you're forgetting is these "ugly hipsters" as you call them, a) have a personality which clearly attracts a lot of people otherwise their channel wouldn't have so many subscribers and b) are often quite rich. The without a girlfriend and living in mums basement comments both therefore seem rather unfounded.
I bit of OT: I find that currently my best photo player is actualy my PS3: very convenient the wireless controller and general application layout to share my pictures on the couch with my friends. I use a uPNP server on a home server with all my digital pictures (more than 40000).
If you are looking for an alternative to speed up your editing in LR, I've been using the XTremist Controller by Pusher Labs very successfully for the past 6 months or so. Whilst the controller really speeds up your work flow, I do agree with 'photo-rb' below, the limiting factor with LR is actually LR! Despite the regular LR lag, with large files, it's a lot more fun and much faster to edit my photos with the controller. I'm not associated with Pusher Labs, just a happy user.
I tried a similar setup with bridge about a year ago. It does work but I found that it disturbed my emotional response to the images, it made it seem like a game in my mind and stopped me responding to the images. It could be that sticking with it may have overcome this but using a games controller was so alien to me I was happy to return to the keyboard.
It's all personal taste but I like being about to sit back a bit while I cull images especially when I'm out with a laptop. You could do it with a separate keyboard but gamepads are smaller and more ergonomic. That last bit is why I use them even with my desktop.
"but I also figured that anyone over about 45 wouldn't have grown up with video games"
why?
That's exactly the age group the DID grow up with video games. A 45 year old today would have been five when the Atari 2600 came out; 10 when the Home computer video game craze started (zx spectrum and c64 was 1982) and 13 when the NES came out (11 in Japan).
That age group grew up at the height of the video game arcade.
That was the first age group, then in their early 20s, that Sony marketed the Playstation to, by putting it in bars and clubs and having a mature advertising campaign. This campaign led to the dominance of Sony because Sega and Nintendo at the time were still largely marketing to children, who (obviously) did not have the spending power of young adults.
A 45 year old would have grown up since the "first generation" of video game consoles, and probably owned several consoles and computers from each generation.
Speaking of age, the first gamers are now into their 60s; the first successful console, Pong, was released in '75. And, to think the parents who bought these early machines are in their 70s or 80s.
I think it is fair to say that lots of elderly people today are pretty much tech savvy. You can visit any nursing home and see people in their 80s and 90s with tablets and smartphones. And WIFI is mandatory in these places. Just remember, computers were introduced to the workplace around 40 years ago, they were all working.
True, there are some who aren't... but that is true for some younger people as well.
And I am not so sure that game playing really means anything. Being adept at Grand Theft Auto won't qualify you for a job.
Me too, in fact I use the exact key layout as the vsco keys I used to use, also offered by pfixer. It is like vsco keys but better. BTW I have no association with them I m just a user
Once you get accustomed to key placement I don't see how one set of buttons is any faster than another. You only have to look at the actions per minute that starcraft players do on a standard keyboard to know it isn't the hardware that would hold back your editing speed. Sure, a game pad might be more ergonomic for long editing sessions, but I have to question the faster part.
Dheorl on the keyboard you mostly don't use the thumbs for culling and most photographers also actively use the wrist (this is not good at all). The next important thing is that with a gamepad the position of your fingers is much more relaxing and your muscles are working a little bit differently. This in general results faster work and less strain :-) I'm not a fan of gaming consoles at all and clearly remember the times I heavily played Wolfenstein 3D and Doom using only the keyboard, but for me moving from keyboard to a gamepad for culling was a level up in speed. So yes, StarCraft players can do a lot on a generic keyboard, but we are not talking about RTS - using a gamepad for culling is something closer to playing FPS with a perfect gaming mouse instead of the PS4 controller :-)
It's virtually impossible to prove because there are simply to many variables. Short of building a robotic hand with human characteristics and letting it learn one method, wiping it then letting it learn the other method, there'd just be to much in the way of previous personal experience, both with practise using that tool and general computing background.
Sure, if a gamepad is what you've practised with then for you it might be faster, but simply due to number of keys, if you're practised enough I don't believe there is any way it can be faster than a keyboard.
Dheorl - I see what you mean, but I'm still sure that eliminating the need to move the wrist up and down and left/right on the cursor keys (like most photographers do when culling using the keyboard) and including the thumb into the process do help to press buttons faster and lower the strain heavily. When the limiting factor is the user reaction time, but not the software speed (I mean how fast Photo Mechanic runs through RAW previews compared to Lightroom and most other culling software) the speed you can repeatedly press buttons becomes important. I can't speak for everyone for sure, but I feel the difference how my fingers muscles do work when the palm is oriented horisontally, for keyboard pressing, and when it's vertically for using gamepad shift buttons. It's a question of ergonomics.
You may remember those old Microsoft keyboards with better palm rest and separated layout, where less palm and finger movement resulted faster and easier typing. Around a decade ago I was comparing different text input methods and clearly saw significant difference - on a generic keyboard I was able to write around 300-350 symbols per minute, while on the Microsoft Natural was closer to 450-480. Both uses keys, but the nuances play the role. Anyway thank you for your opinion, I simply can't agree because I examined the process pretty carefully to decide to include the gamepad into workflow or not.
Right now I can cull around 6000-9500 RAW per hour, while for most photographers a number around 4000 is too huge. Anyway in the future I expect the process will envolve not a gamepad, but something like a rotatable controller, because modern ILCs with 20-60 FPS burst rate can generate giant amounts of images to select from.
I did say we simply wouldn't agree. I'll keep being nice and speedy on my built in mac keyboard.
I would like to give the Surface a go with it's dial, as I think that has potential, but I have little need or desire for a different layout of buttons.
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