I am always looking for new apps to help tie my desktop and mobiles devices all together. The iPad can be such a great tool for consuming content but also in making you more productive as an extension of your desktop. With Lightroom there are so many sliders that you have to adjust it can be pretty time consuming when editing through 100’s of photos.
I came across LRPAD awhile back and thought it was a great idea. It’s a real time remote control for Lightroom and gives you access to most of the tools in Lightroom on your iPad. Before you get the app going you have to download a plugin from their website: http://www.lrpad.com and install this in the Lightroom plugin section. It will run on Lightroom 3 or 4 and I tested it out only on Lightroom 4.
The app is very straightforward, at the bottom of the app you have 6 main sections: Basic, Detail, Color, Camera, Metadata and Preset. They all correspond to a section in Lightroom and have large slider bars that you can use your finger to adjust up or down or tap on the slider to adjust. The touch screen interface makes performing changes pretty quick and the app is very responsive. I went through editing a handful of images from a portrait shoot and it was pretty seamless to use the app vs. the mouse.
What I would love to see in this app would be the ability to customize the screens. If I had a “favorites” tab in the app that only had the main sliders that I used all in one view that would be very handy. Also on the presets screen it does make it handy to see the presets listed out as large buttons, but you can only expand one folder of presets at a time. If you could expand multiples that would be helpful as well as see a preview of what the image would look like with that filter applied. I am not even sure if that would be technically possible or slow down the app a lot since you would have to pull in a preview of the image and then render it but if you could that would be awesome!
Overall though it performed well and did exactly what it says it should, acts as a remote control for Lightroom. Out of 5 stars I would give this a 3.5, it handles being a remote for Lightroom very well I would just like to see some additional features to customize the app.
You can get it in the iTunes store here for $9.99:
Whats your favorite iPad apps for your photography? Let me know in the comments below.
I just bought it, because i though the idea was nice.
For me it is really slow.. i cant work with it as a professional photographer
Its also unintuitive, couldnt find a way to reset sliders. once changed there is no going back because the sliders are so short that you can not change values precisely.
Really, what version of LR are you on? True a button to reset would be helpful, I always use a mouse and trackpad and had used this with the trackpad still for some clicking, would have been better to ditch the trackpad entirely and use this. Wonder if the speed also has anyting to do with your wi-fi speeds?