Loupedeck review

How it is working with Loupedeck?

Loupedeck is a lightroom console and it as an awesome tool to improve your Lightroom skills. It gives you more freedom, because you can focus on what really is important – the picture.

It is an intuitive and interactive tool which helps you to set everything you need precisely and a lot easier than using a mouse or a tablet. Because everyone experienced how moving the scroll bar to the exact position can be tricky sometimes.

Loupedeck comes in a fashion box (which I still use when I travel somewhere and I need to work, because now I do not want to work without my Loupedeck anymore!). And every time you plug it into the Ligtroom Loupedeck tells you: “Loupedeck thinks you look great today” what I as a woman LOVE to read! Cute positive points dear developers.

To start using the console you just download the software and you are ready to roll. I am using the Loupedeck on two machines and these are: a PC working station and Mac book Pro when I travel. So I am experiencing it on two systems and on both it works just fine. I only had troubles with Mac customization because it just didn’t show all my presets. Loupedeck support help to solve it immediately. (Be careful if you have a library with like 100 + presets, Loupedeck may have troubles to read it. So basically you will just temporarily remove few of them, config what you use and then move all the presets back where it belongs. And tah-dah you can start editing.

The console itself is easy to understand. you have scroll wheels, / buttons for everything. You can upload up to 18 presets you are using to the console and with one click you can change the picture in a way you like.
The console works only in “DEVELOP” mode. In a “LIBRARY” you are able to use rating/flags but not any exposure buttons. SO do not freak out if you first time plug it there and nothing is happening.

I think Loupedeck changed a style of my editing a bit, because now I have a 100% control of white balance and I can play whatever I like it more warm or cold.
There is also a crop wheel which is fine for example to straighten the horizon  with (what I am using the most, because my horizons are all the time falling down…:). However as a cropping tool it does not work well for me.  I am keep doing it manually with a tablet pen, otherwise I would surely grow some new grey hair from having to scroll it to the position and composition I want. But as a “horizonfixer” it is excellent.

For you, who are used to work with batch actions, there is a copy button. But be careful, it copies everything. Brushes, crops, fades etc. I skip using copy button because I feel it is anyway easy to use the mouse to select the number of pics I need and click with the mouse into the Lightroom “sync” button where I can manually select whatever I need to apply on the other pictures.

It is a shame though, that is it made out of very cheap plastic, my dear Loupedeck developers. Even my very cheap keybord is made from a better material… The console costs almost 300 EUR and I feel it really deserves to be facelifted with a better material. The arrows work bad, so I usually use the arrow on the external keyboard, because the still-stuck-right- arrow drives me crazy.  I only hope that all the buttons will stay where they are and the arrows will works as well for many years, because the Loupedeck is in permanent use every day for many hours. This is my only concern. The developers are listening to users and via the software they are still making some changes. So you have the console actualized forever.