Loupedeck Photo Editing Console for Adobe Lightroom

Great gizmo for speeding up editing in Lightroom. Well thought out and usually works well. Allow easier and more subtle use of the sliders. PFavourite presets can be attached to buttons for much greater ease of use. Also reduces the amount of mouse clicking that I do which should extend the life of my mouse clicking finger.

This piece of incredible hardware has dramatically increased my workflow/process speed. Other users have commented on build quality and I have to agree that some of the keys are a bit stick and a few of the knobs are starting to fail (not adjusting the settings in Lightroom correctly when turning).Apart from this its a great piece of hardware and would be lost without it. I am looking to upgrade to the new version soon!

Although I am a Vine reviewer and receive some items to review from Amazon, I bought this item with my own money. I am a keen hobbyist photographer as well as occasional part-time pro photographer undertaking paid assignments for businesses and charities. I have used Adobe Lightroom since its first version, and also concurrently use DXO Photo Lab and Phase One’s raw processor, Capture One. I tested this product with the latest version of Adobe Lightroom Classic (as of early June 2018) on a PC running Windows 10 Home Edition (a medium spec PC with 16GB RAM, and i7 8790 processor, 16GB RAM and a GTX 980 video card.The Loupedeck is the only dedicated controller designed for Lightroom. It is not intended, and indeed can not, replace your keyboard and mouse, however it strives to put a selection of Lightroom controls at your fingertips via buttons, sliders and twistable knobs. I believe on release this product retailed for over £200, however the current price is £179 at the time of writing.Installation was easy enough – I downloaded the driver from the website first of all, installed it, and then plugged in the Loupedeck to a USB port on my PC. The Loupedeck was detected and a plugin installed into my Lightroom (LR) installation. After opening and closing LR twice I was good to go and the Loupedeck worked right out of the box.Initial impressions are that the Loupedeck looks smart and elegant on the desktop, however the item itself does feel fairly flimsy and plasticky in the hand. This was not a surprise, as other reviewers had confirmed this, with the harshest reviewers likening the slider controls to the scroll wheel on a $5 discount store mouse. This may be a tad unfair – the overall build feels quite light and flimsy, and the sliders especially, whereas I thought the feel of the buttons and rotary knobs was perfectly acceptable. Note that no sliders or knobs/dials are motorised – they stay in whatever position you left them, although the software does not remember that setting for the next edit. Sliders and controls can be zeroed by pushing them in, which is useful.The Loupedeck has a few controls for the library module, which allow you to assign colour and star ratings very quickly to images and scroll through them. This alone is a time saver for anyone who likes to do this with 100s or 1000s of images after a shoot – you can, for example, devise your own colour and star grading system to indicate definite keepers, maybes, rejects/deletes, etc. It is indeed quicker to use the Loupedeck for this than doing it via the mouse and keyboard.Once you have rated your shots in the Library module in LR you can press a button and jump to the develop module, where you use the bulk of the Loupedeck’s controls. Here you can start with cropping and rotating the image via a rotary dial, and begin to work on common edits, such as adjusting the exposure, shadows, highlights, clarity and so on. The sliders are dedicated to adjusting hue, saturation and luminance of each separate colour channel – nice ! One feature of the Loupedeck that trumps a mouse + keyboard is that you can use more than one slider/rotary dial simultaneously and immediately see the result – neat !Overall I find that using the Loupedeck does speed up editing, but it also gives editing a whole new and more enjoyable feel – being able to keep your eyes on the image and just turn a rotary dial or move a slider to see the effect is a very nice way to work.There is some customisation possible for a selection of the controls, but not all of them, and the Loupedeck software makes adjusting functions pretty easy.So the pros: makes editing quicker, more intuitive and tactile. Easy to set up and partly customisable. It's hard to describe how nice it is to make corrections using tactile sliders and rotary dials while looking at the screen - once you edit this way you will not want to live without the Loupedeck.Constructive criticism: For the money I would have hoped for an aluminium build that was more solid; not all of the often used LR features have a dedicated control on the Loupedeck – for example no dedicated controls for noise reduction or sharpening; no trackball or trackpad so you still need room for a mouse, keyboard and if you use it, a touch-sensitive pad; customisation somewhat limited; no way to raise up the Loupedeck like a keyboard has little flip-out stands; could do with being backlit if possible; only works with Lightroom – you are out of luck if you also or exclusively use another raw processor like Capture One, although I believe Loupedeck may be working on some new products for other software platforms. Also, it doesn't work in Photoshop so if you want to do further editing in PS you can't use the Loupedeck for that. If Loupedeck are listening - please consider even a paid upgrade that allows use of Loupedeck in other packages such as Capture One. Finally, I am experiencing some lag when using the rotary dials - if I turn them very slowly, all is fine, but if I turn them faster than that, there is input lag of up to 3 seconds, which seems unacceptable, especially as I am not using any other midi based controllers simultaneously, all software, drivers etc are up to date and my i7 8790 processor runs at 4GHZ so is no slouch.Are there alternatives? Well there is nothing else dedicated specifically for Lightroom, however some people buy midi controllers from the likes of Behringer and Akai, and then use software like midi2LR to get sliders working with Lightroom. The pros of doing it that way are that in theory you can make midi controllers work with other raw developers as well. The cons are the time it takes figuring out how to set it all up on your Mac or PC.In conclusion – I like the Loupedeck – it is a bit of a niche product and some people just don’t see the use of it – but I enjoy the tactile feel of sliders and rotary dials very much, and this is simple to set up – pretty much plug in and play. It would be a no-brainer at £79-£99 but at £179 it is perhaps only for the very serious hobbyist or pro who spends many hours working in Lightroom through 100s or 1000s of raws at a time.

This deck makes the use of Lightroom much easier and quicker. I have not used it over an extended period but, so far, it seems to cause less strain than using a mouse or graphics tablet.

This is a revelation for Lightroom users. Makes editing much much quicker and more precise. The only negative is that the build quality seems poor. The keys are sticky and I do not think that the knobs will last too long. A shame because it is an incredible piece of kit. At the price one would expect top build quality

The best money I spent!!!! Amazing tool for editing!!! Love love love!!!

Love it... does help my editing and culling quicker

I have been using this excellent device for a few months now and mostly really like it. I am only giving it four stars because it has a few irritating features missing that would make it much more useful than it already is. The limited customisation options are the centre of my problems. They now finally allow C2 to be programmed to "Add to Quick Collection", but there are still far too many things that you need the keyboard to access. Why no equivalents of the X, G, return or ESC keys, etc.I never use the star feature so why can these keys not be programmed? I also rarely use the HSL keys which take up a lot of space. The four way keys at bottom right are not very good and need a good press.Do not get me wrong this is a very useful device, it just could be a lot better. Doubtless software updates will fix these issues.