From what I have understood, the reason seems to be that Lightroom has official support of MIDI console with an API, but Capture One doesn’t. However, with Capture One, I struggled to find proper tutorials on how to use a MIDI console. If you are using Lightroom, you can find plenty of tutorials online that use a plugin called Midi2LR (there are perhaps also others, I didn’t dig into it) which seems to be working smoothly. Moreover, as you will see, you can customize your MIDI console to a level that can’t be achieved with most of the other products. For example, Capture One introduced recently new sliders for Blacks and White, and then a new slider for Dehaze, and I am not sure I could have taken full control of it with Loupedeck. Besides the lower price, I preferred this option to something like Loupedeck because it can be fully customized and is thus more future-proof: If new options become available in my favorite software, I can easily adapt my configuration to take advantage of it.

I went with the Behringer X-Touch Mini because of the low price of around €50 ($60) to try it. So, I decided to purchase a MIDI console – a general term for a controller usually intended for making electronic music – to try it instead. This is something that I thought could be fun, but products from Loupedeck or Tangent cost more than $200, which is too expensive for something I wasn’t 100% sure I’d use. You may have heard about it too, because some of them were reviewed here, here and here on PhotographyLife. Some time ago, I heard about using consoles to control Lightroom.

Customising dxo photolab 2