Lightroom 6 with MIDI

And you thought this day would never happen! I’m of course talking about Lightroom’s GPU support. It allows us to have much more responsive processing, the sliders respond quite instantly to new values.

But wait, there’s more. LR6 also has some new API calls for plugins to use – unfortunately it is yet undocumented. I have however spent this week’s nights mostly reverse engineering the API, and I’m proud to present Knobroom v0.3 which has partial support for new LrDevelopController API, which seems to be a new way of setting develop sliders.

Here’s a little demo of the speed, recorded on a two year old MacBook Pro Retina 13″ using the Intel GPU. Those of you who have Mac Pros might get even faster response?

And how does the new API help? On the video, note how the slider section changes depending on which control I am moving. Also, see at 30 seconds where I am changing exposure and vignette with two hands, which results as a “Multiple Settings” history entry.

I addition to faster response, the API also seems to provide method for accessing different tools, and when the Adobe chooses to document this, I will add more functionality for the plugin.

Download 0.3.1042

Slight note: the new API only works in Develop module, meaning that the knobs do nothing if you are in Library mode.

Comments

comments

16 thoughts on “Lightroom 6 with MIDI

  1. It’s MUCH more responsive. A completely new experience. I love it. But It doesn’t update the BFC2000 so It can’t be used 🙁
    Tested on a i7-4790k 4,4 Ghz Hackintosh with 32Gb RAM and a GTX970 with 4Gb.

  2. so.. this plug in will work with any kind of midi controller? or should I get some specific model or brand?

    1. Anything that sends Continuous Control messages is OK, and if it listens to CC even better.

      You can map custom CC values to Lightroom sliders in plugin preferences.

  3. Thx, one more question!

    if the controller is not motorized fader, what happens I adjusted the value on the nob or fader, and then move on to another photo. The value holds or the point where the nob or the slider lies sets to default(zeroed)?

    I am not sure I address my question right.

    Thx.

  4. What exactly is knobroom looking for from the midi controller? I have an arduino outputting midi commands, but I can’t figure out how to map to knobroom.

    1. If you use the plugin mapping tool in plugin manager, it can only be set to use first channel. Manually editing the .json should allow any channel.

      1. Thanks. I got it working. I misunderstood the format for midi messages and wasn’t sending the right data.

        Thanks very much for putting this tool together, it’s quite simple to use once you get a hang of it!

  5. Hi Jarno

    Wow, thats a great gift… the second after the GPU support in lightroom. Thank you for your great plugin.

    (I have today released a video in my blog about your knobroom… but you don’t understand what a speak. Its swiss-german 😉
    Here’s the video: http://wp.me/pG8LC-2Co

    Best regards
    Michael

  6. Hi Jarno,

    Amazing stuff. Just in the process of polishing my ipad / lemur app setup to talk via your plugin to lightroom and found 1 bug and one bug or feature.
    Bug:
    If the processing mode is 2010, the mapping of shadows points to the highlights fader instead of the blacks fader. So both highlight recovery and shadows point to the same fader and there is no way to control the blacks fader.
    Bug/Feature:
    Found no way to put faders that have a positive and negative value (like exposure -100 to + 100 , exactly at zero . Only at -1 or +1.

    1st one is more serious as now 1 fader can not be controlled.

    p.s. Going to put some money your way as super great tool !!!

    thanks and let me know if you have a solution for above.

    Glenn

    1. Judging from the screenshot, you are running on Windows. Plugin only supports OS X, Windows support was dropped out couple of years ago.

      Forward looking statements: apparently there is new socket support coming in LR6 SDK (yet unreleased), which could help me writing support for Windows version in future.

  7. Hello Jarno, I just bought a Nocturn for your software, and it looks very good! There’s a pretty good tutorial on Youtube in German (https://youtu.be/YwlyGxGNGgM), I’m not sure if it has been posted here already.

    He programmes the Nocturn with its software (AutoMap) by “learning”, and I guess it’s just recognising the commands of Knobroom. Things that are not in Nocturn (like straighten or the parameters of the gradient/radial/brush filter) it doesn’t understand. That’s a pity… 🙁

    Also, Automap has “Qwerty assign”, and I hoped it would understand key strokes, but it doesn’t. I hoped to assign buttons to Zoom (“Z”), Original (“”), Reject (“X”), etc. There’s no way to do that (yet)?

    Anyway, many thanks for your trouble!

  8. Hey,

    Great plug-in, I was looking for this exact one, and tried it out with a Korg NanoKontrol 2 and the Develop features worked out perfectly, but some of my top used controls didn’t. The essentials like Exposition, Contrast, Vignetting, and even Rotation are already configured, but the Navigations wont work, when I press Previous and Next it jumps 2 photos, instead of one. Also I was looking to set on my tablet the Stars for rating (already on the keyboard 1 through 5) and didn’t find them. Also, is it possible to set a command for Virtual Copy. We’re using the plug in on Lightroom 5, as you said it worked on this version too.

    Thank you for enabling the software.

  9. Is this plugin supposed to support Lightroom CC 2015 (v6.1) yet? If not, is this something I can hope for any time soon?

    I’ve extracted the latest Knobroom plugin to C:, open the Lightroom Plug-in Manager, choose Add, choose the knobroom.lrplugin folder in C:, but the MIDI Mapping and other plugin-specific settings areas never show up. I’ve disabled end re-enabled the plugin, reinstalled the plugin, tried different folder paths, ensured I have full control of the plugin folder, and tried this setup on two different computers (home and work, both legitimately licensed without any other issues).

    Here’s what I’m seeing: http://i.imgur.com/ly4kJcG.png

    Thanks very much.

    1. It is only compatible with Mac OS X. You seem to be running on Windows, which is not supported by this plugin.

Leave a Reply to Jarno Heikkinen Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *