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And if you fall in love with it, please do let us (or at least let ME!) know. Lightcrafts does have a fully functional demo of Lightzone and if you have not given it a try, I urge you to do so. If I get a spare $150 bill any time soon, I may buy the "basic" version to act as a supplemental editor for use with Lightroom, in other words, as a Photoshop replacement. I'm pretty fond of the editor in Lightroom and I manage to get 99% of my post-processing done satisfactorily in it. I no longer have it installed, and have only Photoshop Elements 5, and I dislike launching even that. I think Lightroom and Aperture are priced just about right, and they are both much safer choices - even if they are somewhat less inspired, at least in their core functions, than Lightzone is. But considering that Lightzone is very much a marginal player here, I personally felt that the price was a bit too high to justify the risk.
EDITING TIPS IN LIGHTZONE FULL VERSION
The full version of Lightzone 3 costs almost as much as Adobe Lightroom. That means there are no books on the product and the number of folks you can call on for help is pretty limited.Īnd that guess leads to my personal feeling that Lightzone is too expensive. My sense is that Lightzone makes a really good first impression on reviewers - but that it doesn't have that huge a user base. Perhaps performance has improved with version 3. As I am one of those photographers that often comes back from a shoot with hundreds of images to process, I am very fond of Lightroom's ability to manage lots of images efficiently I do not believe Lightzone can match Lightroom in this department. I found Lightzone 2 to be painfully slow I am not sure, but I think I read somewhere that it was programmed in Java and that that explained the lousy performance. Unfortunately, in my own limited testing, the rest of the program has enough weaknesses that I have not been able to persuade myself to stick with it. They are not bound to satisfy a zillion old customers who are used to the way things work in Photoshop or whatever.
EDITING TIPS IN LIGHTZONE FREE
In Lightzone, on the other hand, I had the feeling that, because the UI is so original, they were free to provide just one way to do each thing that needs to be done. Contrast and brightness sliders seem to do some of the things you can do more precisely with the tone curves, etc. In LR, vibrance and saturation seem to overlap. And in Lightzone, I don't have the feeling that I have in Adobe Lightroom, that many of the tools overlap one another in their functions. The other tools in Lightzone complement the zone editor pretty well. I think for example that Lightzone can do something like HDR editing, without requiring that you give it multiple images to start with. This gives Lightzone something very remotely like layers in Photoshop - again, a bad analogy, probably, but not entirely without merit. And it should be noted that, in Lightzone, you can have more than one zone map. Still, the zone editor in Lightzone seems to be able to do the same kinds of things that you use the tone curve in Lightroom or Photoshop to do. NOTE: I am reasonably proficient now with Lightroom's tone curve tool and I am very aware that it is very hard to compare it to the Lightzone tone editor. After playing with it just briefly, I found it to be a truly brilliant UI device for editing photos - very intuitive, and very powerful. It seems strange at first, but only briefly. By grabbing the dividers between zones, you expand or contract each zone's dynamic range. Each of them, I think, equals one half a zone as defined by Ansel Adams. But the Lightzone zone editor gives the user (if I recall correctly) sixteen tonal areas to deal with, rather than four. This bears a very remote resemblance to the tone curves tool in Adobe Lightroom.
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Lightzone has one unique and wonderful feature - the zone editor. But I haven't quite given up on Lightzone. That's why, earlier this year, I bought Adobe Lightroom rather than Lightzone. I'm not sure that it is, at least not yet. I really want it to be as good as it seems it ought to be. I may throw myself at it another couple of times before I give up on it. I have thrown myself at Lightzone several times.