Keyboard shortcuts for Red/Cyan, Green/Magenta, Blue/Yellow

Software darktable
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There is a product called the Smartconvert Control Panel, which is a keyboard-panel inspired by the Fuji Frontier film scanners. I stumbled upon this product in a youtube video.

It provides six keys in three opposing pairs:

Screenshot 2025-11-30 at 15.31.52
Screenshot 2025-11-30 at 15.31.52458×304 139 KB

I thought that’s a really cool idea, and promptly implemented it in darktable, using my numpad as

  • 7/4 for red/cyan
  • 8/5 for green/magenta
  • 9/6 for blue/yellow

I used the color calibration R/inputR, G/inputG, and B/inputB sliders, and mapped the keys to their respective up/down action.

This seems to work really well for quickly canceling a color cast in an image, and is fairly easy to remember: 789->RGB, 456->CMY. For fun, I additionally mapped 123 to reset RGB to 1.

(Doing this I noticed a bug in the color calibration sliders. Their bar colors seem incorrect. A bug report has been filed.)

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This is cool! Note that if you have a keyboard with switchable key caps, you can probably nab up those color key caps pretty cheaply.

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I am working on that :grin:

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Wow, a simple 20-key keyboard for 300€. That’s quite extreme even for someone who looked into the ergonomic-mechanical-keyboards-rabbit hole recently :D. They must have a pretty good margin…

I like your idea with the shortcuts, though. I’ll give it a try as well.

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Hehe I’ve done exactly the same with the color balance in Negadoctor :D. And I agree, 300€ is, like their auto advancing backlight film support, shamefully too expensive.

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I should investigate this idea. I used to own photographic printing equipment including one hour printing lab that worked on a keyboard layout like you suggest to tweak the colors. If I can set up the shortcut keys I would adapt to it so easily.