"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin this video we are going to take a look at the new loop deck CT which is a tool for creative work it allows you to make powerful adjustments really quickly across a variety of applications and it's customizable to your specific needs as a creator this is one of my new favorite things this is luke beck CT and it is essentially an input device that's designed for creative work whether that's visual work whether that's audio applications whether that's visual and so if you think of input devices like keyboards and mice traditionally or what we've had mice are designed to basically point-and-click and do one thing keyboards were designed for typewriters and so we really have never had an input device that was designed for creative work there's been a couple tries in the past I think loop deck have nailed it with loop deck CT and I want to share this with you today so this device is made up of a series of knobs that you can twist touch buttons physical buttons and then you've got this wheel down here that you can assign to various things so think of it this way if you're editing a photograph and let's say you're adjusting exposure you're dealing with white balance sometimes there's multiple parameters that you want to be able to adjust and it's kind of nice to be able to do that one with a physical dial but also to create a layout to where you can get to these really quickly and just be more in the moment and what this allows me to do is feel like I'm actually creating something rather than just pointing and clicking or trying to memorize keyboard shortcuts it's compatible with a wide range of software applications for instance image editors like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop you can do video editing if you use Adobe Premiere or even Final Cut Pro and it also works with audio editors such as Adobe Audition and even Ableton Live to things that you need to get set up and rolling first of all you need the actual controller and you also need the loop deck software which allows you not only to customize all the functionality that you're going to find on the controller but it's also going to allow it to interface with whatever application that you're using and so you can find that if you go to loop comm if you go under the setup section of their website and depending on whether you're on Mac or Windows you download the installer for your platform and then install that launch it plug it in and you're ready to go I've got this hooked up using the included USB C cable which does power the unit it is worth noting that this will support bluetooth any future software update but as you can see it all lights up to tell you basically how you have this configured there are default configurations we're gonna look at in a second you can also customize everything pretty much to whatever you want it to do one thing that I love about loot deck it is aware of the application that you're using so for instance we're in the finder right now if I switch this over to let's say Photoshop you can see that the buttons change to correspond I can move over to Lightroom I can move over to let's see Final Cut Pro and we get another change so it is aware of what app you're using at the moment the customizations are all up to you this is a very powerful controller with a lot of customization but it's actually very easy to use so probably best if we start by breaking down and looking at how this is organized so if you look at loop deck CT I want to begin by talking about what we refer to as workspace elements and this includes everything on the top half of loop deck and then also the wheel now workspace elements are elements that you can assign parameters to for adjustments they're fully customizable and we can also arrange these in different ways but this includes things like for instance the dials on the top I'm in Adobe Lightroom right now and if I want to adjust exposure this middle dial on the left hand side I can turn to bring the exposure up I can also turn it to bring the exposure down if I want to reset the exposure to its default State I simply press the dial in and it resets that adjustment we have 12 touch sensitive buttons on here they do support haptic feedback which is really cool if you need more than twelve of these you can do what we call custom pages and so to scroll to us another page just simply grab the bottom row scroll to the left and I can switch pages like this so this starts giving you an infinite number of possibilities of buttons that you can have on the unit itself under that we have the wheel which is kind of the really cool of feature on loop deck and I find myself mapping a lot of stuff to the control wheel because you can change this so we have in the middle a touch screen so I can select something like tone curve or vignette inor sharpening and I can turn the wheel to make that particular adjustment if you want to reset any of these adjustments just like on the smaller dial so you can double tap in the middle of the wheel to reset the adjustment to its default state we also have a touch screen so this supports pages as well and I'll show you how to do these in a second in the software but if I simply swipe to the right or the left I can go through various pages that I want to have set up so what's really cool about this is you get a lot of power just in one adjustment which is the wheel now the second category of buttons on this unit or what we refer to as general elements and these are still customizable but they're going to be elements that you're going to change less so for instance on the right-hand side of the unit we have our arrows for navigating for instance if we're in Adobe Lightroom we're in the grid view and we want to navigate around you can use those we also have on the left-hand side for instance this little green circle is your home button so you can press that any time you want to get back home we have undo and savestates which actually in Lightroom brings up the export dialog box you have keyboard controls and we also have function keys down here which basically allows you to customize this even further this gives you a secondary functionality to any of the round buttons for instance so there's a lot that can be customized in loop deck but I think one of the important things to mention right now is this concept of workspaces the idea that you can have a different set of depending on different tasks that you might be doing I'll give you an example so for instance with Adobe Lightroom let's say that you just came back from a photo shoot the first thing that you're gonna probably be doing is a lot of culling of images a lot of rating a lot of flagging you're not necessarily performing major color edits at that point so we can set up a workspace just for sorting and culling through images now we could set up a different workspace depending on what it is that we're doing we might be doing just some general global developments we might be doing something more specific with colors we might be doing something like applying working with presets so these are different configurations that we refer to as workspaces and this is really key because this gives you a lot of power to using loop deck another design aspect that will help you a great deal in navigating loop deck is the way it color codes things so for instance green buttons indicate workspaces so for instance if you look at the round buttons I can see that one two three are all green five is green and eight is green these indicate that I'm switching workspaces if you see purple buttons these indicate actions so for instance on the touch panel I can create a virtual copy it's an action just by touching that button if you see the color blue this indicates that we're going into a page based layout so for instance on the touch buttons here on the top right-hand side we see developed presets if I touch that I'm going to go into a page of development presets and to apply I just touched the corresponding one that I want to apply if I want to go back we can just touch basic adjust page and it takes me back to the page before and you can customize all this in the software pages can also be found on the wheel so for instance this next one over is basic panel wheel if I touch that it's going to take me to a different setup on the wheel and I can scroll the pages simply by swiping on the face of the wheel screen and then there's another one here which is tool selector wheel which kind of does the same thing it gives me a different layout one thing that I want to note about lube deck is it is designed really well for one-handed operation however don't think that it's not powerful because I found that I can pretty much put everything in here that I need this just really frees me up for a lot of creative possibilities if you don't have loop deck open it is super easy go up to the top of the screen I'm going to select the loop deck icon and I'm going to go down and say open setup this will open my setup window now the first thing you want to check on here is you have your device type we are on loop deck CT that should be selected by default for application I have Lightroom classic selected but just note that Photoshop would be something different if I'm modifying my Photoshop workspaces I'd go down and select that this supports multiple applications but for our example here we're going to be working in Lightroom classics so I'm going to select that one now this is super easy to use because it's simply a graphic representation of the physical unit if I hover over any of these keys I'll get a little contextual pop-up that tells me what that is set to do and I can modify all of these so for instance I can select any of my workspaces and you can see that the configuration changes depending on what I have selected and as I mentioned everything is drag-and-drop so for instance if we are in the basic adjustment workspace and I have temperature let's say for our dials here I have color temperature I have exposure and I have contrast well let's say that I want exposure to actually be on the top all you have to do is click and drag this and it will switch those two let's say that I don't want this to be contrast I have color temperature but I also want to do my tenting in here too I can simply go over here and you can dig down through these folders I can go to adjustments and I can go down to find it there or you can search and if I just search tint you're going to see that tint comes right up there's actually calibration one two but I want the basic panel tint we're going to click and drag that over onto this contrast and it's going to replace it as tent and these are also reflected when I go back over to Lightroom and you will see those on the device itself now loop deck provides you a default setup of workspaces and configurations that you can use in here but the real truth is is that everybody approaches software a little bit differently so you want to be able to customize this what I recommend is when you first get lube deck is to go through here and see how they have things set up because it's gonna give you a lot of ideas of things that you can do on your own but we can start from scratch and create our own workspace entirely and that's what I want to show you how to do now so there's two things that we need to do first we need to create the workspace and then we need to map it to one of the green circular buttons here so first of all just click on any of these and it doesn't matter which I'm just simply bringing up the workspace panel over here on the left hand side of the screen we're gonna have to map it later anyway so under workspaces you're gonna see there's two categories and these are folders and so if I click on the folder icon it will expand it and I can see all of the workspaces that I have created and we have development workspaces and library workspaces if I click on the plus sign it's going to create a new workspace and if we go to the bottom it says new workspace I'm going to select that we'll select the pencil icon I'm gonna rename this put my cursor in there we're gonna call this presets I'll show you how we can set up something that's really powerful using presets and so we now have our workspace selected and you can see that it's completely blank we have a blank slate over here first thing I want to do is I'm going to add some presets into these touch buttons up here because when you touch one of these I want it just to apply a preset so if we go down here I'm going to go down to the develop presets folder here and I'm going to find all the presets available in Lightroom and here's Ted floors preset Packo one I'm gonna select that folder and let's go ahead and map some of these over to various buttons I want all my modern presets so let's go for you just simply drag these over and drop them on to the button you want them to be assigned to okay so now I have mapped these to the touch buttons so if we go over to Lightroom now you're going to see nothing happened because we didn't map this to anything yet so the second thing I need to do is I need to take this workspace let's go back up to the top here's my presets workspace I need to map it to something so I can do one of two things if I map it to one of the current workspaces it will replace whatever's there if I need more space the other thing you can do is click the function button this will give you more space so let's make this function too so I'm not deleting anything but I can still find it and now I'll deselect that let's go over to Lightroom and you can see now when I hold down the function key and then press 2 it will bring me into that workspace and now I can very easily apply presets so lanceolate flat I can do portrait warm and you can see the first problem that we have with presets in general is this image came in with it kind of a hard exposure it's very contrasting she goes too dark real quick I'm gonna go ahead and right click let's reset all of that to things that I might want to add to this configuration so first of all maybe we want to reset all adjustments let's add a button for that let's go ahead and search for it reset and reset all adjustments there and so now when I go back over and you can see I'm starting to build something when I apply a preset I have a reset image button as well so I can reset it back and then let's go over and add some more to this the next thing I want to do let's deal with the wheel here because one of the problems that you will inherently have with any presets is with an image like this that is very high contrast is sometimes the presets get applied and they just don't look good on applications so I want to be able to do three things I want to be able to modify the exposure and at least the highlights and shadow detail also so let me show you how to set that up let's go back to loupe deck and what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the wheel to select it and what we want to do is we want to add a new wheel page and it's going to give me a set of templates that we can choose from the clock is great as that is we want some other stuff in here so I have three things I want to do I'm going to grab the horizontal one two three here let's go ahead and select that and now we have a new wheel page that's set up and it is empty and you can see is I hold the mouse over this there are three slots I can put things in so I want to do let's say exposure and we're gonna grab the exposure settings here and we're going to grab also highlights let's put that in the middle and then I want shadows and you can select whatever you want on these but these are the three that I use the most on here now it's gonna happen the other thing I'm gonna do is let's delete the clock because it just don't need it anymore now what's going to happen is when I go over to Lightroom you're going to see that that is set up now so whichever one of these select will be what the wheel controls so if I tap on highlights for instance now the wheel will bring back the highlights if I double tap it will reset it to its default state I can also open up my shadows so on and so forth so the first thing I'm going to do is let's grab exposure I'm gonna bring it down just next let's bring it up just a little bit let's grab the highlights bring those back so we can recover some of the stuff that's blown out back here and maybe shadows and just bring them up just a little bit and now we have something to work with now when I apply presets for instance if I do one of my vintage color presets it's not quite so blown out and contrasty there so we retain some highlights we also have a shadow detail so now when I bounce back and forth two presets we're gonna have a lot more consistency because I've kind of dealt with the image somewhat so here's what I've got which is kind of a selection of things that I can do and I can continue to build on this let's go back over to loop deck and let's say I want some adjustments that I can make over here for some of my dials as well so maybe we want white balance for instance so let's say color temperature let's grab temperature let's put that there let's go in here and let's say I want tint as well and let's grab that I can even grab saturation if that's what I want anyway you can start to customize these and what I've done here is I've created a brand new workspace we've assigned this to one of the general tabs here join the general controls and now we're able to call that up and it gives me something very powerful that I can work with on loop deck another application that I want to show you loop deck in the context of is Photoshop and a Photoshop is a really difficult application to come up with some preset workflows because everybody uses Photoshop so differently but I want to show you kind of how I'm using it so this is an image that I shot in organ this year this is an infrared image that I've converted to black and white and let's say I want to do some burning and dodging with this and I'm gonna use layers I'm gonna use Photoshop to do this well loop deck did a pretty good job with the presets that it ships with you probably will require some modifications but the first one is basic tools that you might use now for this instance I'm going to use the brush tool and I'm gonna show you how you can work really fast with this so the first thing I want to do is just simply select the new layer button and it will create a new layer now let's say that I want to change this from normal to soft light well I could use the mouse and do that or there dile already set up for that so I can use the blend mode layer let's bring that down and let's come down to soft light here and we're going to do just some black and white over this to change our contrast a little bit so the first thing we've got the brush tool selected and I can change the size of this tool really easily by just twisting the dial so we can make it bigger or smaller I can also change the opacity of that so for instance let's start with just bringing out some more contrast in shadows so if I just start to paint on here and we'll just experiment a little bit it looks pretty good but I might want to say bring this down just a notch so I can change my opacity and what this does is not the layer opacity but the brush opacity so now we're at forty seven so let's bring this in just a little bit maybe bring it way down or some of these areas but it allows me to dynamically sit here and make my adjustments and paint as I'm going and this is something that is really big because it's a big time-saver because this is something that just kind of takes forever if you're just kind of stopping to click every now and then I'm gonna go back to white here let's bring that in and let's bring out this section in here just a little bit I'm just eyeballing this but and I would want to refine it some more because I'm talking and showing you this while I'm doing it but but my point is is that you can kind of do this on the fly which i think is particularly useful and continue to work in here and bring out some of these leaves a little bit and probably want to bring my opacity up a little bit and it's bringing up a little more than that now we're starting to get some nice contrast going here which is really nice bring this one out a little bit anyway you can kind of see where we're going to do a quick before and after but anyway it just saves a lot of time when you want to start to alter the overall contrast of an image another thing that's particularly useful in here is we can do a lot with layers and if I go into button 6 here which is some layer management what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to page 2 and for instance what we can do is we can add a brightness contrast layer and then the also the other thing that's very cool is you can assign these parameters to various things for instance if I want to bring my brightness up I can do that and I can also adjust the contrast I can make some major adjustments to my image without using the mouse at all and I can kind of get this exactly how I want it to quit before and after there's before here's after anyway Luke Dex ET does a really good job with a complex app like Photoshop for instance any keyboard shortcut you can actually assign loop dick you can do Photoshop actions so you can have really complex things that you need to repeat over and over you can just assign those to one button another cool use for the wheel in Photoshop is color selection so if I go over to button number five here and this is in the presets that loop that comes with you're going to see that we have some preset colors for foreground and background so I can select these so for instance if I just select one of these like maybe the cyan or even the dark blue I can select yellow for my foreground colors I can select background colors and I can go ahead and do some of the presets for the same the other cool thing that is pretty awesome in here is if you use the wheel you can use hue cube for the for color or the background so if I select the foreground for instance I can now use this you just kind of click and drag like a mouse or actually touch and drag I should say and then you can change the hue by rotating the wheel so you can really quickly come up with some color combinations without having to leave loop deck which I think is very nice and of course if you're used to keyboard shortcuts you can still use those with loop deck as well with the keyboard modifier for instance if you want to do a fill layer you can do option or Alt Delete for the foreground color or you can do shift command delete for the background color for a film so the idea behind loop deck CT is to give you an input device that allows you to not only work more quickly and more efficiently but it allows you to set this up and configure it to work your way and I think the most interesting part about this is when I started using it when you go into the software and you start doing your own custom configurations and you set things up it forces you to kind of think about how you do want to work and allows you to do things in a new way that you hadn't thought possible before and this is much more interesting than keyboard shortcuts to me in fact in many ways this is kind of a life changing device and we didn't even get into video or audio editing in this and it opens up a world of possibilities in whatever software application you're using I would love to know what you guys think if you want to learn more I will drop a link below so check that out and I'll see you guys in the next video until then later\n"