butchM Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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I opted for something a bit more versatile that can be applied to more than just photo editing, yet keep things much more simplistic compared to the 'gobs of knobs' approach some others have pursued for Lightroom editing.
I have been editing much more video in the past couple of years and really wanted to find a jog/shuttle solution to simplify my NLE workflow. Using a mouse or touch pad for fine-tuning edits was less than desirable compared to what I had used back in the Olden Days of tape decks. I found the Contour Design ShuttleXpress ($59) to work very well for that.
It has the normal jog/shuttle dials as well as 5 other buttons that can be programmed to whatever commands the individual user requires and comes with packaged configurations for almost all the popular video, photo and even word processing apps ... all those presets can be customized or even create totally new sets. The buttons can also be configured to run more complex macros instead of the usual keyboard commands.
They also make a big brother version, ShuttlePRO v2 - $99) that has 15 buttons along with the jog/shuttle, but I thought for my needs that was overkill. I like to keep things simple.
As it turns out, when I was setting up the device for Final Cut Pro X, It already has a configuration for Lightroom and Photoshop. I wasn't to impressed with the defaults for Lightroom so I made some changes to suit my needs.
Best part, you can configure the device for all you different apps and when you switch apps, the device is aware of the change and honors the desired configuration.
There is one caveat for working in Lightroom in the Develop module in the manner I have chosen, the most efficient method is actually using a two-hand method. ShuttleXpress in left hand and mouse/touch pad/pen tablet in the right hand. For any slider in Lr Develop module, if you place the cursor over any slider, you can adjust the slider with the jog wheel. When you move to the next image, the jog wheel does not require being reset back to a neutral point.
In Lightroom, even though the jog wheel can adjust the desired slider in Develop, when in the Library module, the jog will navigate columns of images vertically and the shuttle dial will navigate rows horizontally (with wrap-around). Quite neat that it recognizes the currently used module.
I've only been working with it a relatively short period, but so far I really like it.
The devices are available at all the usual online retailers but here is the manufacturer's site:
http://www.contourdesign.com/US/product/shuttlexpress/
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