When you're beavering away in your editing suite, converting images to black and white, tweaking the colour balance, and adjusting the levels, how do you work? Graphics tablet? Mouse? Keyboard shortcuts? A mixture? The team behind Palette is looking to provide a new, more tactile means of making adjustments and applying presets to our images. They're hoping that Kickstarter can help bring to life their customisable, modular, hardware interface for editing. Comprising blocks that fit together like Lego, a palette allows you to edit your images using tactile controls. Different functions are assigned to different controller blocks; these include buttons, sliders, and dials.
If you decide that you need to reconfigure your palette, switching your toy camera preset to a black and white preset, you can do that via the Palette web app.
The Palette team is looking for CA$100,000 in Kickstarter funding. Pledges for Palettes start at CA$99 for the brushed aluminium four module starter kit, comprising a master block, a button, a dial, and a slider. Then come six module apprentice kits and 16 module professional kits as well as some limited edition cherry wood ones, too.
Palette might not be so great for editing on the move, but I like the idea of having physical controls over my edits, rather than relying on mouse, keyboard shortcuts, and trackpad. I also find Palette's flexibility and reconfigurement and expansion capability appealing. It's also worth pointing out that Palette isn't just for photographers: the controllers can be assigned to interact with music production suites and video editing programmes; if you've another idea, get in touch with the team.
Interested? There's a heap more information on Palette's Kickstarter page!