VSCO Keys Speeds Up Your Lightroom Workflow with Keyboard Shortcuts

Visual Supply Co (AKA VSCO), best known for its film emulation software, has launched a new product that’s designed to reduce the time you spend post-processing your images in Adobe Lightroom. VSCO Keys is a tool that adds powerful and customizable keyboard shortcuts to Lightroom 3 and 4. You can assign keys to the various sliders in the program, allowing you to keep your hands off your mouse during photo editing.

The software comes with two preset keyboard layouts, but a simple web-based graphical interface allows you to create any number of custom keyboard layouts tailored-made for your workflow. You toggle the custom keyboard on and off by pressing the ESC key while in Lightroom.

Here’s a snazzy little promo animation:

…and here’s a walkthrough video showing how it actually works:

If you find yourself doing the same repetitive edits using your mouse for most of your work, then assigning those adjustments to keyboard keys can definitely help make your life easier; muscle memory helps much more when you’re using a keyboard rather than a mouse.

VSCO Keys isn’t exactly cheap: priced at $125 $79 [see below], it actually costs about the same as Lightroom itself. There is a 14 day free trial though, which allows you to see what kind of time-savings you can achieve by using it.

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Update: VSCO has lowered the price of Keys to $79 (or $59.25 for current VSCO Film owners).