Best Photo Editing Controllers of 2026

An iPad on a stand, a stylus in one hand, and a dial under the other: that is the setup the Elite Plus exists for. It is TourBox's first console built for iPadOS, and its dual-channel Bluetooth 5.0 holds a tablet and a Mac at once, so you switch devices without re-pairing or hunting for a dongle. The fourteen controls and the TourBox presets come along for the ride, which means Procreate and LumaFusion get the same dial-and-button treatment as the desktop Adobe apps.

Among a group where nearly every pick assumes a desktop, that flexibility is the reason this one earns a place above the wired consoles for tablet-first work. The haptics are the detail we did not expect to care about: the console buzzes faintly at each detent, so you feel a value step instead of watching for it. The Ice Translucent shell is also a welcome change from the black boxes the rest of this list defaults to.

What you pay for is the radios, not more buttons. Fourteen controls is the same count as the NEO, so the premium buys the wireless link and the tablet support. And wireless should not be confused with pocketable: at 376 g it is a desk object, just one you can move between two of them. For anyone whose week splits between a tablet and a laptop, that is the trade worth making.

Most keypads ask you to remember which square does what. The MX Creative Console puts a small screen inside each of its nine keys, so the key that adds a mask shows a mask, and you can upload your own icons when you want something more literal. We hand this one to people who move between Photoshop, Lightroom, and Illustrator all day, because the labels follow whichever app is in front.

The dial and the roller are separate, which sounds fussy until you use it: the roller walks the filmstrip or the timeline while the dial works the active slider. Fifteen keypad pages per profile means a busy layout rarely runs out of room, and the stand angles the whole thing toward your hand instead of lying flat. Three months of Adobe Creative Cloud come in the box, which softens a mid-range price.

Our real reservation is the software link. Everything routes through Logitech's app, and setups where that link fails do exist — newer macOS releases and recent Photoshop versions have caused trouble, and the app sometimes opens a beta build instead of the release one. Check that the current software lists your operating system and app versions before ordering, and buy somewhere with an easy return. Once the link holds, the labeled keys are the part you notice all day.

The shuttle ring is the reason to buy this one. Push it away from you and it springs back the instant you let go, so you can creep forward a few frames and stop exactly where you meant to; the jog wheel beside it turns in positive, clicky steps. Nothing else in this group feels that mechanical, and we mean that as praise.

Fifteen buttons ring the wheels, and the software watches which application is in front and swaps profiles on its own — from Lightroom to Premiere and the buttons follow without a menu. It is ambidextrous, compact enough to sit beside a keyboard rather than replace it, and it carries a two-year warranty where the rest of this list offers one.

Where it fits is stepping rather than painting. For reviewing a shoot, checking frames one at a time, or walking a timeline, this is the most satisfying control in the group, and the spring-back lets you scrub fast and land precisely. For brush size and slider nudges the TourBox layout is the better tool — this one is about travel through time, not about parameters.

At 75 g and under an inch thick, the ACK05 goes into the laptop sleeve and you forget it is there until you are editing on a hotel desk. Ten keys and a dial, Bluetooth 5.0, and a 1,000 mAh battery — the whole thing is smaller than most mice and light enough to hold in one hand while you press a key with the other.

For editing away from your desk, this is the one we pack. It is the lighter of the two compact keypads here, the keys and wheel feel more solid than the little body suggests, and four switchable sets turn ten keys into forty shortcuts, which is plenty for culling and straightforward develops. Anti-ghosting across all ten keys means combinations register the way you expect rather than dropping a press.

Budget an evening for the software. Without XP-Pen's driver it is a plain keypad; with it, you map each key, set the dial, and name four sets so you can flip between Lightroom and Photoshop without opening a menu. The mapping screen is clumsy in places, but the four sets are what make ten keys enough.

XPPen built a joystick into the Pilot Pro, and if you grade video that is the control that matters: one thumb pushes a color wheel around while three rotaries wait under your fingers for exposure, contrast, and whatever else you hand them. Nineteen buttons fill in the rest, with more than a hundred commands spread across seven themes.

It is also the most connected console here: Bluetooth 5.3, a 2.4 GHz dongle, or a USB-C cable, with a built-in battery rated at 24 hours. An on-screen readout tells you which theme you are in, and a small motor buzzes against your palm so you feel a detent without looking down. The sculpted layout is genuinely designed for blind operation rather than flat keys with a logo on them.

Build is where it gets uneven. The plastic feels lighter than the TourBox shells, buttons have stuck or worked loose on some units, and the drivers have refused to cooperate on some setups — including settings that reset after a power cycle. None of that happens to everyone, but it is why this sits below the top picks rather than beside them.

What it buys you is a wireless, haptic, joystick-led console for less than the TourBox premium, and for a Resolve editor who wants a thumb on the color wheel, we think that trade is worth a careful look. Check the driver notes for your software first, and keep the box until you have run a full session on it.

Eighteen programmable keys and a dial for the smallest outlay in this group is the headline, and it is a real one: this is the most buttons you get here for the least money. It is slim at 0.42 inches, weighs 4.16 ounces, pairs over Bluetooth 5.0, and registers up to five keys at once for combination shortcuts.

The feature worth knowing about is the Setting Preview key. Press it and a popup shows what every button and the dial are currently set to, which solves the problem every programmable pad eventually has — forgetting what you mapped three weeks ago. That is the sort of small thing that saves a trip into the driver in the middle of an edit.

For a first controller or a second station next to a laptop, this is where we start people. The dial carries three assignable functions, so the single dial goes further than it sounds, and the keys are spread wide enough to hit without looking. What you give up is a second dial and any kind of jog wheel, and the body takes more desk space than the Mini Keydial ACK05.