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The Loupedeck Creative Tool is a physical control deck for creative apps

The Loupedeck Creative Tool is a physical control deck for creative apps

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Look at all of the dials and buttons

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Loupedeck has announced a new editing console for creative work called the Loupedeck Creative Tool. It’s designed to help bridge the gap between the infinite toolbars and toggles of apps like Photoshop, Lightroom, or Final Cut to the real world through an array of customizable buttons and dials.

It’s a similar concept to the company’s original Loupedeck and Loupedeck+ consoles, but the Creative Tool takes things a bit further by having a far more customizable user interface. Where the original Loupedecks offered a mix of pre-labeled dials for things like contrast and exposure alongside unlabeled user-customizable dials, the Creative Tool uses miniature screens to assign whatever tools or functions you’d like to the buttons and dials on the device.

There’s also a giant customizable touchscreen wheel, which doubles as both as a touchscreen display for controls and a programmable dial for things like scrubbing through a track or adjusting an image.

It also supports way more programs: in addition to Adobe Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro X, the Creative Tool supports Ableton Live and Adobe Illustrator, with Autodesk Fusion 360 planned before the end of 2019. The company also plans future app support for next year. Developers interested in working with Loupedeck to add support for their own apps can also contact the company here.

At $549 — which is more than twice what the company’s Loupedeck+ console costs — it’s not cheap. But if you’re the kind of person who spends all of your time in a creative app, it might be worth the investment. As someone who loves creative hardware solutions for digital software, the idea of something like the Creative Tool seems really great, giving a more fine-tuned and tactile approach for interacting with these purely software-based tools.

The Loupedeck Creative Tool will be available from Loupedeck’s online store and B&H starting on November 11th.