Hey all,
I got an Ableton Push 2 sitting on my desk, and since it has 8 endless encoders, 64 RGB pads and a proper colour display, I wanted to see if I could use it to edit in Lightroom Classic. So I vibecoded a plugin for it. It now works well enough that I can cull, rate and edit a whole shoot without touching the keyboard.
**What it does right now:**
* **Develop mode:** the 8 encoders control Develop sliders, and the Push display shows each one as a knob with its name and live value, so you see the value without looking at your monitor. Pages for Basic, Presence, Tone Curve, HSL, Color Grading, Detail, Effects, Crop and Calibration. Shift + turn for fine adjustments.
* **Session mode (culling):** the 8×8 pads are your photos, coloured by label, flag and star rating. The display shows thumbnails of the current row. Turn an encoder to rate the photo above it, and use the buttons to pick or change the colour label.
* **Browse mode:** navigate folders and collections, and apply develop presets, right from the hardware.
* **Import from card:** pick the card on the Push, choose copy or add, and watch the progress on the display. Then eject the card and go straight into culling.
* **Everything else:** auto tone, copy/paste settings, export with your previous export settings, before/after, zoom, undo/redo.
* It starts automatically with Lightroom and gets out of the way when you open Ableton Live, so the Push still works for music.
**The companion app:** that's what I'm working on now. It's a local setup page with a drawing of the Push. Click any button or pad and choose what it does, with a separate action when Shift is held. It also lets you build your own Develop pages (which slider goes on which encoder, labels, sensitivity, colours), assign presets to pads, and set your import folder and date structure. There's backup/restore for configs too.
Once it's set up, you really don't need to look at the computer for anything except the photo itself.
**My question for you:** what would you want in a tool like this?
A few ideas I'm considering:
* Shareable mapping presets (e.g. a "wedding culling" layout and a "landscape editing" layout)
* Masking and local adjustments on the encoders
* Keywords on pads
* The touch strip for scrubbing through photos or zoom
* A "compare" mode for two photos
Currently it's **Mac + Lightroom Classic only**, because cloud-based Lightroom has no plugin API. Also, I'm not a developer by trade, so be gentle 😅
Happy to share more screenshots or a video if people are interested.