LightZone
rutt
Registered Users Posts: 6,511 Major grins
LightZone is an upstart competitor for Photoshop. I've met the developers and had a demo. It's designed to be more photographer friendly than photoshop. People more comfortable with the darkroom and especially students of Ansel Adams will appreciate that. There seems to be a lot of sound thinking here. This may not exactly be a mature product and it's not the all purpose tool that photoshop is (enhancement, retouching, prepress, all colorspaces). But if I were starting out from scratch today, I'd give see how far I could take it.
If not now, when?
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Just one question if you don't mind: does it do RAW (at least a DNG one)?
www.ivarborst.nl & smugmug
Well, I'll try it then:-)
What is interesting is how this is really designed around not only applying corrections to entire images, like any other tool does, but applying those changes to easily selected areas of the photo. Basically, it makes masking very very easy. It has an easy versioning capability, and the tools, though weird at first, are fairly easy to figure out.
Though it offer RAW editting, it is completely unfamiliar, and seems limiting. In any case I prefer RSE or Bibble lite for that. (perhaps this explains the RT version)
I am not sure this speeds workflow, and there seems to be no ability to choose 'Auto' exposure or white balance, which for me gets me in the ballpark fast, ready for tweaking. It claims to be base on the 'zones' from Adams, and indeed it does a nice job of pointing out the zones on a given photo, the result of which does a quick job of setting the black point, but I am not too sure about its use for exposure, at least I don't like the result. Oddly, with all it 'Adams" brewhaha, it doesnt even provide a "rule of thirds' cropping overlay.
There is no sorting, labeling, rating, keywords or EXIF editting provided, so it stinks as a DAM tool. It is fairly quick, kicking the Lightroom beta in the ba*** on that acccount, but who doesn't?
So, I will keep trying it out, but not sure if this fits me, or I am ready to trust it just yet. It is different enough to require quite a bit of investment in time to understand if it works.
Hmm, hitting their site I see there's an "RT" version now. That looks really interesting since I'm loathe to give up my Bibble tool. Looks like I really need to make some time to investigate it.
http://www.chrislaudermilkphoto.com/
By the way, I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe is going to buy LightCrafts Inc. sooner or later, just the way they recently did with Pixmantec, to incorporate LightZone into Photoshop, Camera Raw, and/or Lightroom. However, no particular info about that, just speculating ...
-- Olaf
I met with Fabio, the CEO, and went from skepticism to interest. I have such a huge investment in photoshop knowledge that I can't take the idea of switching lightly. But for people just getting started with digital color correction and enhancement this is an alternative.
Fabio took my challenge and processed a shot of mine from raw. It's one I fussed over a lot and even wrote a tutorial about post processing. Here are Fabio's result, processed entirely in LightZones (left) and my result from the end of my tutorial (right):
I could get into details about why mine is better than his, but, really, I have to admit, it's pretty darn good. I also have Fabio's LightZones file which shows all the steps (in LightZones everything is a layer so that you can always see the steps from looking at the file.) You can get Fabio's lzn file which shows his layers here.
He got his result in 6 layers and one can argue about whether what he did was more or less intuitive than what I did.
Another good thing about LightZones is that they are a very small company and still in very active product development. They take suggestions and feature requests very seriously. So you are likely to be able to make personal contact with them and get good responses quickly (pretty different than Adobe, that way.)
On my monitor both images are very nice but I am leaning more towards Fabio's (left). Fabio's seems to have better sharpening (for me) especially obivious on the foreground, legs and background, better contrast on the faces and better contrast/color separation on the clothing (yours being darker could also account for this).
I more I look ... the more I think Fabio's is better.
Gary
Unsharp at any Speed
I don't think that's the real question. At this point it's like the go-round I had with Shay a while ago where he really wanted me to compare two roughly similar edits (his and mine). The real point is that both looked much much better than the original and the difference between the two edits was subtle by comparison with the improvements from the original. A lot of personal taste goes into these edits and they will also appear different at different sizes and on different output devices. I didn't sharpen for this size, in particular.
My real point was to show that Fabio was able to use LightZone get a result competitive with the one I was proud to get with Photoshop and some years of reading and practice. So as for color correction and enhancement, LightZone definitely seems to be on the map. No support for color models other than RGB means it won't be a great prepress tool (CMYK support is really a requirement for this.) I'm not sure how well it works for tasks such as compositing, matting, &etc.
But I wouldn't have brought it up if I hadn't been impressed with both LightZone and Fabio.
http://www.chrislaudermilkphoto.com/
Not that different. It's not unusual to go to the Photoshop user forum on Adobe's site and see posts from Photoshop engineers. Thomas Knoll posts on the Camera Raw forum.
I am also heavily invested in a Photoshop skill set but a worthy competitor with a fresh perspective can only be a good thing and give us more options.
Shay, have you tried this? Anyone?
http://sonic.net/~rat/lightcrafts/
ziggy53
Moderator of the Cameras and Accessories forums
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
I've been thinking about this for a while, but now I definitely have to check it out. I did cringe when I read that you need to use a Sun JRE; I've had my share of bad experiences with Java GUIs on Linux. (And on Windows, AIX and Solaris, too.)
For tweaking individual images, I have to say the LightZone's ZoneFinder is quite nice. In conjunction with the ZoneMapper, you have Adobe Lightroom's Highlights/Midtones/Shadow controls but with a better visualization of what you're changing and easier control of the effects.
http://www.chrislaudermilkphoto.com/
Unless I were able to go both places and play. I get a lot out of the books I have on photoshop................
In fact, each time I upgrade, it is another batch of books, mags, and reading here.
ginger