Review: Loupedeck

The humble keyboard. Its holy QWERTYness. The layout of its keys, designed to keep a typewriter's hammers from colliding as they struck the page one after another, was forged in the mechanical era. Though considered by many to be an imperfect design, it stuck around long enough to make the leap to the digital domain.

Even with alternative solutions (touchscreen laptops) and augmentations (Apple's Touch Bar) available, the QWERTY keyboard still reigns. Creative pros have dealt with it by learning esoteric keyboard shortcuts to hit up their most-used commands. Now, a new gadget promises to free those folks from their finger acrobatics. Loupedeck has made a unique input device just for digital photographers. It's a keyboard designed specifically for use with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Loupedeck

This product was born of Indiegogo, and it has obvious appeal for anyone who has ever poked and prodded Adobe's tiny adjustment sliders for any amount of time. Designed and built in Finland, the Loupedeck board features scroll wheels, buttons for commonly-used features, and even arrow keys and a jog dial for rotating and cropping images. This sounds like a photographer's dream come true. But, unfortunately, it's a product that let me down very quickly.

Pictures don't do the Loupedeck justice, and, in fact, I think the photos may lead you to believe this'll be a nice piece of kit. Even the nicely-designed packaging set me up for an Apple-like experience, with raised ink logos leading to high hopes.

But then, as I pulled it from its stylish black box and started to feel how chintzy this thing is, my heart sank. It's terribly cheap. Plastic all around, with a flimsy bit of silver plastic trim, this keyboard feels like a sub-$50 product, certainly not a $260 one.

Instead of neatly integrating with Lightroom out of the box, it requires special software drivers, which are available for PC and Mac. After installing them and restarting Lightroom, I was off to the races.

At first, Loupedeck worked pretty well. The idea of directly manipulating controls with a dedicated device is appealing, and I loved making subtle corrections with the twist of a knob or dial. Once I got into the groove, I reached for Loupedeck's right arrow key to advance to the next image in my edit queue. That's the precise moment when the whole experience came apart at the seams. The arrow keys, essential to navigating Lightroom via keyboard, are a nightmare on this keyboard. They're wobbly, mushy, and need to be pressed dead-center to work at all.

The dials on the Loupedeck work as expected, but the scroll wheels for controlling color channels are rough. I've used dollar-store computer mice—you know, with the roller ball in the bottom—that have nicer scroll wheels. These hardware shortcomings are all the more infuriating because at its core, the idea of the keyboard is friggin' brilliant. It took me a bit to get accustomed to the layout, but there's something really satisfying about having precise control over things like contrast and clarity without laying a finger on a mouse.

Especially at its $260 price, I can't recommend the Loupedeck. Once the company sources some higher quality components, it might be worth a look. In its current incarnation, its potential is completely undercut by its execution. That said, if a greatly improved v2 Loupedeck comes along, it's something I could see myself shelling out hard-earned cash for.