Two active inde­pen­dent projects for both the Mac and Windows were unearthed this morn­ing. Knobroom & Paddy seek to improve your work­flow by allow­ing us to use MIDI-controllers to manip­u­late image settings.

Knobroom: Direct manip­u­la­tion add-on for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3

Main moti­va­tion for devel­op­ing Knobroom is improv­ing ergonom­ics, which in the end will improve your cre­ative work­flow. Sliders are quickly acces­si­ble and eas­ily adjustable with­out caus­ing mouse-related injuries or stress on your wrist.

Paddy: A free Windows-only work­flow improve­ment pro­gram for Lightroom.

With full sup­port for Lighroom 3’s script­ing engine, Paddy rad­i­cally improves the work­flow by allow­ing you assign any adjust­ment set­ting — includ­ing mov­ing the slid­ers and apply­ing a pre­set — to essen­tially any key, your num­ber key­pad, exter­nal key­pads, and MIDI con­troller knobs and sliders.

This strikes me in awe as I have been pro­ject­ing the same need per­son­ally — when­ever I’m on LR. A dif­fer­ent kind of long­ing sur­face when­ever I use Aperture — respon­sive­ness & screen real estate.

Aperture’s UI makes me feel at home, its con­trollers are bril­liantly designed and ren­dered on-screen beau­ti­fully, but its reac­tion to my input are often delayed — not by inac­cu­rate input — but by the lack of speed from the machine I’m run­ning it on.

Perhaps it’s time for me to get those Mac Pros, or get more RAMs.

(via John Nack, Vincent Verdet)