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June 15, 2011
Open for Voting

P: Keyboard Shortcuts for Basic Tone and Color Adjustments

  • June 15, 2011
  • 49 replies
  • 1726 views

Please add keyboard shortcuts for basic tone and color adjustments, either for Develop module sliders or Library module click buttons. Photographers who do any volume of work in Lightroom know that mousing around is a pain. Unfortunately, 3rd party keyboard add-ons suck or are very expensive. Keyboard shortcuts for basic tone and color adjustments would offer much greater efficiency.

By "basic tone and color adjustments", I mean:
temperature
tint
exposure
highlight recovery
fill light
black clipping
brightness
contrast
saturation
vibrance

49 replies

Participating Frequently
January 10, 2012
You've never used a proper keypad setup. It is physically impossible to be faster at making fine, precise adjustments using a mouse pointer to select a control than simply tapping a single key. This is easily proven: type with your mouse with an on-screen keyboard. Compare your mouse-typing speed with typing one-handed (so we're doing a fair comparison) on a real keyboard.
Participating Frequently
January 10, 2012
Well, the typical keyboard has at least 47 keys that can be assigned to shortcuts, and as many as 80 or more. Assuming three modifier keys (Ctrl/Alt/Shift on Windows or Command/Option/Shift on OS X), that gives us 8 possible modifier combinations. Even after removing system-reserved combinations, we still have at least 350 combinations available to us, and as many as 600 combinations for those with full keyboards.

Ergonomically, tapping a single key (since I can remap any key combo to my USB keypad) will be many times more efficient than using the period and comma keys to shift control focus, never mind grabbing the mouse, aiming the pointer at a tiny on-screen control (thus taking my eyes off the image), then clicking or pressing keys.

Adobe: You already know how to do this. Just give us a Photoshop-like keyboard shortcut preference pane in Lightroom, and we'll take it from there.
Participating Frequently
January 10, 2012
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Inspiring
November 23, 2011
Bring it on! LONG overdue! Photoshop has it, Capture One has it ...
Participant
November 22, 2011
Desperately want this!
November 17, 2011
For those on PC, try Paddy-for-Lightroom.com.
It has both keyboard mapping and using Midi physical sliders.
Inspiring
June 20, 2011
Zlatko, you are right. The customizable keyboard shortcuts should allow one to address practically all UI elements. It will require a hierarchical organization of the mappings but would then also make a great "look up the shortcut" (without using a manual) feature.
June 19, 2011
TK, thanks very much for the link. I have just voted for Peter Law's "Allow for keyboard shortcut customization" idea. However, I'm not sure whether his idea would allow for keyboard shortcuts for the basic color & tone adjustments. It may be just for the ability to reassign the existing shortcuts -- which is a good idea -- but would not achieve my goal of doing basic adjustments via keyboard shortcuts.
Inspiring
June 18, 2011
Just add the functionality to customise shortcut key, that way people can do what they want. An alternative would be 1&+ to increase, 1&- to decrease, all the way up to 9&+, etc
Inspiring
June 18, 2011
Anyone wishing to vote for custom keyboard shortcuts can do so here.