Minimal setups, maximum functionality

Image courtesy of Shane Smith

Are you a Lightroom power user?

Is your desk space limited or minimal and you don’t have room for lots of additional gear?

While Palette Gear is great for tactile, precision editing, there are a lot of adjustments that you can make in Lightroom, and you might be thinking that you would need an endless amount of physical dials and sliders to make all of the adjustments.

However, with this neat trick, you don’t necessarily need a Palette dial for each Lightroom adjustment you’d like to control. Here is how to control any function in Lightroom using just one Palette dial and still have speed and precision.

1. Why Should I Use a Dial?

You might be wondering, why would you want to use a tactile dial to make adjustments as opposed to your keyboard or mouse? Palette Gear goes beyond keyboard shortcuts and hooks deep into editing software like Lightroom to give you access to tools and control that you would not get with a keyboard, and with faster access than a mouse.

Unlike Palette sliders, Palette dials are infinite scroll so you never have to worry about start and end points.

A tactile dial also adds more precision. It will keep your eyes and focus on your work, as opposed to the buttons and sliders around it.

You can set the sensitivity of a Palette dial making it a more precise editing tool and less strenuous than a mouse.

Video courtesy of Shane Smith

2. How to Set Up the Dial

In PaletteApp, simply click on the dial you would like to map. An automatic list of functions are brought up. The ‘Adjust any slider’ function is available under the Develop Module menu.

3. Using the Dial

There are two ways to adjust any property in Lightroom using a Palette dial.

1. To make coarser adjustments, simply hover your cursor over the slider in Lightroom and turn the Palette dial.
2. To make finer adjustments, click on the property number to the right of each slider and then turn the dial. If the number is selected, pressing the dial will automatically select the next property.

Watch the video below to see how to setup a Palette dial as a universal controller for adjusting any property in Lightroom and how it works:

Have you tried this trick? Let us know if you would use a tactile dial to make adjustments in Lightroom in the comments below.

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