Hasta La Gadget!

Mar 09

LRPAD, an iPad Multi-Touch Controller for Lightroom

Posted in: ipad, photography, Software and Operating Systems, Today's Chili

LRPAD let’s you control Adobe Lightroom from your iPad

LRPAD is an iPad app that will let you control Lightroom on your Mac or PC. Install the application, and then grab a free Lightroom plugin that acts as a go-between, and you can adjust most aspects of your photographs using slider controls on the iPad’s touch screen.

Lightroom is Adobe’s RAW photo processing software, and goes up against Apple’s Aperture. Both are great, and both work very differently. I prefer Lightroom.

Whichever you use, you will still have to click and drag on fiddly on-screen controls, or learn a lot of keyboard shortcuts, or both. LRPAD takes these fiddly switches and replaces them with finger-sized strips that can be touched and dragged. You get access to all of the sections that run down the right-side of the Lightroom screen when in the develop module, and they are in familiar order: Basic, Detail, Color, Camera and Metadata. You can tweak saturation, sharpness, lens corrections, exposure — everything. It feels very natural to be sliding sliders like this, and in combination with keyboard shortcuts you’ll get pretty fast results.

Pretty fast, but not instantaneous. The iPad app talks to your Mac or PC over the Wi-Fi network. I have a good, strong 802.11n network with only n-capable devices connected, and there is still a small delay between setting something on the iPad and seeing the effect on screen. If you’re used to Lightroom, you’ll have a good idea of how much to tweak a setting, but instant results would be nicer for trying out new effects.

The setup is a little clunky. Although the plugin apparently advertises itself on the local network via Bonjour, you still have to manually add the network address of the computer to the iPad app. You may have to restart the app and/or Lightroom a few times before they see each other, too.

LRPAD costs $10. That would be a steal if it was a little faster, and if it let me make my own custom layouts of buttons to group the most-used controls on one screen. It should also give access to my Lightroom presets, and to an on-screen tone-curve adjustment. It also adds the keyword LRPAD to to metadata of any photos you edit with it, which is rather cheeky.

Still, I like it, and it is only a few weeks old. Hopefully updates will make it even more handy. If not? Well, it’s still cheaper than a roll of film.

LRPAD product page [iTunes]

LRPAD product page [LRPAD]

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