Loupedeck More Photo and Video Editing Console for Adobe Lightroom Classic, Photoshop CC, Camera Raw, Premier Pro CC, After Effects, Audition, Final Cut Pro X and Skylum Aurora HDR

Despite the fact that this is second one I ordered (first one ordered for photographer friend), I missed to take unboxing video, as was unpacking like a child ;) for me this is second brand found here on Amazon, after Anker, who has great packaging, minimalist, still stylish and enough secure for shipping. The rest is from the point of view of Adobe Lightroom Classic user (not using other apps and maybe will try if it will work with Luminar later): Design is great as of allocation of controls and buttons, practically you have access to all major functions at a time and doubling them with fn button. Especially rotary and scrol controls with "reset" functions with click (depress). Both above mentioned makes it easy to use for all categories of users from beginner level and up... In addition it has wonderful app to manage device functionality, changing and fine-tuning settings out of default app specific presets. As of value for the money it seems great to me - and I'm not trying to evaluate and compare even other manufacturer's devices, but even compared to their advanced model CT - even if this one is bigger and "bulkier ", still ability to have simultaneous access to multiple scrolls and dials at a time (2 hand operation) is "advantage" over CT's design, especially for beginners and specific to photo processing. Plus price is half of that... I'm planning to play around this one and also get CT later, so I can compare those two... Overall, this is an amazing tool.

I’m going to answer the question on content creators,gamers and streamers. ((((Loupedeck consoles versus Stream Deck)))). 🎮🎥 If you're on the fence about which one to choose, I've got your back! Here are 5 reasons why you should consider buying Loupedeck consoles over Stream Deck: 1️⃣ Enhanced Editing Power: Loupedeck consoles are specifically designed for photo and video editing. With their intuitive layout and customizable dials, buttons, and sliders, you'll have precise control over your editing software. It's like having a mini editing studio right at your fingertips! 2️⃣ Seamless Integration: Loupedeck consoles seamlessly integrate with popular editing software like Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro. This means you can effortlessly navigate through your workspace, adjust settings, and perform complex tasks with ease. It's a game-changer for productivity! 3️⃣ Superior Ergonomics: The Loupedeck consoles are ergonomically designed, providing a comfortable and efficient workflow. With their tactile buttons and responsive dials, you'll feel more connected to your editing process, resulting in quicker and more accurate edits. Say goodbye to tedious mouse clicks! 4️⃣ Durability and Build Quality: Loupedeck consoles are built to last. They are constructed with high-quality materials and have a sturdy feel that can withstand long hours of use. Investing in a Loupedeck console means you'll have a reliable companion on your content creation journey. 5️⃣ Community and Support: Loupedeck boasts an active and supportive community of creators who share tips, tricks, and custom presets. Being part of this community means you'll always have a resource to turn to when you need inspiration or guidance. Plus, Loupedeck's customer support is top-notch! Pics Ive uploaded are stream decks getting “white screen of death” you wont see this problem with loupe deck So, if you're serious about taking your editing and streaming game to the next level, consider getting yourself a Loupedeck console. Its specialized features, seamless integration, ergonomic design, durability, and fantastic community support make it a worthy investment for any content creator.

Coming from a traditional darkroom where you turn knobs to make actual adjustments, this is SOOO cool and not just in a novelty way... The price is pretty hard to take, but if you are in a stuation going though a lot (hundreds/thousands) of photos at a time its well worth it just for sorting ease. I can also see how overtime it will allow you to become a better editor I am already finding myself using adjustments i would have never used without the ease of the loupedeck. Only complaint is the cord but I think speed would drop if it was cordless ask a gamer... lol Overall I am happy I splurged on myself I think the quality is good, and its not that much more than a MAC/Corsair/other high end mechanical keyboard. It would be cool if it was built like a Corsair keyboard... I don't need RGB but that cord... It would be better braided since this is going to get moved anytime its not in use, also at least backlight stuff PLEASE lol the color wheel dots are pretty small and who likes to have ambient light on to read a keyboard? Also since you insist needing a USB it would be cool if you had a passthrough USB on the deck somewhere, it's wide enough you could easily put one on the side (I am sure you are already developing the next version). Its mostly NICE plastic.... Titanium or something would be cool but then again I probably couldn't afford it if you did that lol. But don't think because it's plastic its 'cheap' its extremely well made. I think a lot of the bugs and stuff you read will be resolved with firmware updates, just make sure you are using the correct Lightroom version for your firmware it matters. ALSO INSTALL DIVERS BEFORE YOU PLUG IT IN!!!!

Let me start short and sweet. If you are a Lightroom user, I think you will fall in love with Loupedeck+. I have used it 2 days now, and it is very intuitive on Lightroom. The knobs for all the main adjustments like Exposure and Saturation have this velocity-based adjustment protocol. This means if you turn the know quickly, or aggressively it will make a large change, and rotating it slowly is for fine adjustments. Plus pushing the knob straight down with a satisfying click will reset the adjustment to zero. Incredibly intuitive, loved it immediately. I have very large hands, and I love the spacing and the size of the controls. Clearly a lot of thought went into the ergonomics here. The feel of the entire piece is quality. I found that its operation became intuitive quickly, and there are a lot of controls here. A Fn key acts as a modifier, doubling the functions of all controls. I culled and edited a 3000 exposure shoot, and by the time I was through, I felt I had a command of the functions. I can say 2 things, first, I found myself tweaking more than I did in just the software itself, because it is so accessible, all laid out for you. I also found that I got to my final edit of images I did not have to round trip into an external editor much faster and far more enjoyably than with the software itself. For me personally, I do not want to edit without it now. It is clearly the proper tool for the job. It is a lot like why you buy a top-of-the-line pro camera, all the controls are physical and accessible, no navigating menus to get what you want. This is a 5 star product, for Lightroom. Unfortunately, I don’t use Lightroom, I use Capture One and at least for now, there is the rub. The implementation on C1 is in beta release, and lacking a lot of the slick functionality of the LR version. After trying this on Lightroom, I desperately want this tool to edit with. In C1 at the moment, Loupedeck is interfacing by emulating a keyboard, meaning turning a knob generates key presses in the system. It does not have the “push knob to reset” functionality, and since a knob turn is generating what the system sees as a series of key presses, Undo requires hitting a number of key presses to actually Undo the knob turn. Clumsy and inelegant. Loupedeck installs a Capture One Keyboard shortscuts file to interface. The problem there is a number of C1 users, including myself, bought the Capture One bundle from Phase One that included the Logic Keyboard for C1. That keyboard requires its own Keyboard shortcut to work. So right now Loupedeck will not work with the Phase One keyboard, and vice versa. Now Capture One has internal support for the Tangent Wave controllers, and this is activated by a checkbox in the preferences of C1. TangentWave panels are great, but they are almost $4K for the whole rig, and far more than a photographers needs. They do support the “press to reset” knobs as well. Tangent also make a VS version, using an iPad for the panel, but dragging my finger on glass doe not have the great interface feel of a physical knob. I emailed both Phase One and LoupeDeck to ask that they please work together to make this as seamless on C1 as Loupedeck it on LR. I plan to keep bugging both companies. Love the LoupeDeck+, just need to see it fully functional on Capture One.

Updated (3/6/2021) My custom profiles no longer work and I can no longer change the assignments for the various buttons. The app no longer picks up which Adobe product I am trying to use. I've attempted to outreach to Loupedeck multiple times and have not gotten any responses. So I am downgrading my review to 1 star. Review from when I bought it: I got this in the mail today and I am impressed with it so far. I opened up Lightroom and went to process some pictures that I took last month that I have been meaning to get to. I give it a solid 4 out of 5 stars. In a lot of other reviews I see the material quality get a hit, in my opinion the quality of the material and the device is what I would expect. Yes for the price it would have been nice to have seen maybe some metal, but the plastic is a good quality and all of the buttons and features work as expected. Pros: - Easy setup. Install the software then it's plug and play. I did change around some of the defaults on the custom buttons to make some of the more common features I use more accessible. - All the knobs and buttons are easy to use. The more I used it, the more comfortable I became with it. After the 4th picture, I was really comfortable with the settings. - It's light and easy to move around. - It's really easy to change the functions of the knobs and buttons. - Really responsive. The knobs adjust the amount they change based off the speed of the turn. Cons: - Knobs are a little to sensitive. As I was going between the D2 and D1 knobs, I would occasionally lightly brush one of the other knobs between them and it would turn it and trigger the change in Lightroom. - There is a delay between the console and when Lightroom records the step in the history. This would cause some issues. Example, I set C6 to apply the Lens Correction function. I ran into an issue where if I pressed that, then C3 (auto-tone) to soon then Lightroom would not apply the auto tone and in the history it looked like the auto tone was applied before the lens correction. So I found that it was a good practice to wait for the step to show in history before continuing. I especially ran into this if I was adjusting the Hue/Sat/Lum of color ranges and went to undo the work, sometimes it would not work properly. (To me this is a little issue because there were ways to work around them). - The console is a little to big. I think they could have shrunk it just a little bit. - During setup I tried plugging into a Apple Keyboard that I have connected to a USB 3 port on my PC and it didn't want to work. I needed to plug it directly on the Motherboard. I have a feeling that the USB port was not supplying enough power to the Apple keyboard for both that, the console, and a keypad I had connected to it. So if you are going to connect it to a USB hub, you may need to use a hub with it's own power supply.

When I first purchased it, I was disappointed. The build quality isn't as high as it could be. For instance, the potentiometers don't feel as solid in your hands as they do on a high-end piece of audio equipment. But after using the device for a month, I realize that everything actually does work exactly as intended. And with so many pots, the cost would be much higher if the build-quality was on the high-end. In short, it works just fine without deficiency. If you buy this thing, be a little patient with it. Like learning how to type, your fingers don't originally know exactly where to go. Eventually, my brain just learned where all the pots that I regularly use are. I'm much more efficient using the Loupdek+ for most of the images that I need to adjust. I don't typically make adjustments to individual color tones, so I don't use the back row of sliders. It almost seems like a bit of a waste to include them, consideringly how rarely I would use them. As far as the large keys go, I guess they would be important for people who swap keyboards for when they're editing. For me, I keep the Loupdeck+ directly behind my keyboard, and I use the keyboard for pretty much everything it works for. I use the Loupdeck+ for the pots. I was going to give this a 4-star rating, but it really does do exactly what it claims, and it saves me a ton of time. If I had to change one thing, I would make it be able to adjust Shadows and Highlights in Lightroom without needed to go into Develop mode because that takes time to enter and exit. Of course, this is probably a LR limitation, not really Loupdeck+'s fault.

In short, if you use Lightroom Classic and you can risk your edit grinding to a halt while the Loupdeck hijacks your computer, it mostly works. If you edit via Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw, it doesn't work at all. ACR support is through Photoshop only, so you'll only be editing one photo at a time. I gave it the full review period to try out, and edited all of my shoots using it (when it worked). Software Most of the complaints about software are still true. The Photoshop plugin wasn't automatically installed. The software often failed to communicate, requesting that you shut everything down and start back up in the proper order. Bugs The biggest issue I ran into happened about once every photo edit session. When advancing right (right arrow), it would get stuck, continuing to the right until it hit the end of the film strip. Unplugging the device doesn't stop it. Closing the software doesn't stop it (If you can. It's spamming the OS with key commands, making it difficult to navigate). Re-starting LRC doesn't stop it. You have to hunt down another instance of Loupdeck's software and kill it, all while it's fighting you. Many of the controls are just keyboard commands, meaning they don't operate smoothly, and can sometimes fill up your 'history' log with repeated key presses. Cropping with the big plastic wheel feels especially bad. Hardware I don't care much about how cheap something feels if it works, but this thing really is unimpressive. As others have pointed out, everything is loud, plasticky and cheap feeling. The non-removeable USB cord is super thin, and likes to retain its shape a little bit too much. Use in Other Software The whole selling point is the labeled controls that map to LRC. They somewhat map over to Photoshop, but in the weirdest, most broken way. Anything that doesn't have a native plugin will only read the dials as key commands. Conclusion If you have a disability or injury that makes it hard to use your mouse, and you edit exclusively in Adobe Lightroom Classic, this might be worth it at half the price. Perhaps their newer hardware is better, but it's priced outrageously.

Reviews of the original version say it seems cheaply made, which is why I didn't buy it, but the Plus version seems pretty nice. Now I wish I could figure out how to use it. There is a PDF owner's guide that covers some of the basic functions, but doesn't give you any clue about the workflow or various other things you need to know. It's too bad there are no tutorial videos out yet for the Plus version, as the functions are quite different from the previous model. I got the impression that the Plus version was simply a quality improvement, but it's much more than that. I have no clue as to when new videos might show up, so I don't know if I should wait for them or spend a lot of time trying to figure out this product for myself. Very annoying. Edit: after looking through the old video tutorials on the Loupedeck website, I have to say I'm not impressed with the way they were produced. They appear to be more for advertising purposes than for actual training of human customers. The editing is fast and choppy, like you would use to catch the attention of busy consumers. Instead of helpful narration, there is dramatic music. Important details are left out. Video transitions are quick and disruptive. I think these were created by the marketing department. They make you want to buy this cool new toy, but you are mostly on your own trying to figure out how to use it to best advantage. If you are new to Loupedeck like I am, you should probably wait until updated tutorial videos are available for the new Loupedeck Plus. (Hopefully they will be better than the old ones.) Then you can watch them and see if you want to make the purchase. Someone needs to publish a Loupedeck guidebook to help photographers get the most out of what could be a powerful tool. I will give it a couple of stars for physical quality of the device, but none for functionality, since it is currently useless to me. I will update this review if new and better tutorials become available.