I have been using Adobe Lightroom to process my photos for the last year or so. Love it!
Taking a look at Paddy. I had heard about it as a key-mapper - allowing you to speed things up with keyboard macros. Little did I know that it is much more powerful.
Add a Behringer BCF2000 and you have control over all the sliders. Considering that I already own one of these for my music stuff, this is a no-brainer. Here is a video outlining its use: