WM: from what I hear, writing photoshop plug-ins is a nasty business. I certainly wouldn't be able to do this myself. If anyone interested in this project that has the know-how to do this sort of thing, I'd love if you could contribute. JakTen's mockups are certainly a good layout for the most part. I'd probably have 3 verticle sliders on the left, with two knobs (stacked vertically) on the right, with a row of programmable buttons lining the bottom. I'll draw up some stuff. but really - RGB? Artists use that?
Tourist: unfortunately, that's a bit out of my small budget for this simple project. I'm not looking for anything revolutionary - just useful.
I've been looking at more components and the idea of using touch-strips rather than sliders is kinda interesting. It has it's pros and cons
Pros:
Could have a toggle switch, so one touch strip could control multiple functions in-software. This can't be done with physical sliders - once you switched the slider to control another function, it would automatically effect the value in accordance to the slider position. In other words, there would be no memory of where the sliders once were when switching between functions.
Cons:
There is no visual representation for what value the slider is at with this method. I can't look down and say "oh, thats about 50%" - with the physical sliders I dont even really need to look, just feel. If I wanted to get into pretty complex electronic engineering, I guess I could line up a series of LEDs and have them light up in according to the position of the slider value.. that'd take a lot of work.