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LightZone, another RAW developer


gdb

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Gentlemen,

 

Purely incidentally, I found another RAW developer called LightZone.

 

I downloaded a trial version, and was amazed of the ease of use to select parts of a picture you want to work on. It is done through the so-called "Zone System", and you just have to point to a zone scale to see all the parts of the picture corresponding to this zone selected at once. Then you can work on curves, histograms, hue, saturation and so on.

 

Do any of you have tried this software? And where do you think it stands compared to Aperture, Lightroom, Capture one and other RAW developers? There is alos a plug-in that works with Capture one to introduce this zone selection system in Capture one.

 

Advices and opinions would be most welcome.

 

Thanks in advance

Gérard

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Bonsoir Gérard,

 

I tried it, and still prefer Lightroom (Aperture is too slow on my iMac).

The idea behind Lightzone is great, but it's too difficult to use acurately (for me) and it's easy to damage your images...

So I get better results with Lightroom, and I will certainly go forward with it.

 

NB : I used only Lightzone -RT because the full version crashed all the time

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Guest stnami

I have used it since beta days, great as a 'plugin' type of support for Lightroom especially with some tricky tonal work in B&W like a low major image

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Guest malland

Lightzone is very good, and I find that I can get to the tonal effects that I want more easily than I can with Photoshop curves, which often push tones around that you don't want to move. It also has much a selection and feathering facility (called "regions") that are vector-based and much easier to work with than Photoshop.

 

It cannot be compared to Lightroom, which, by design, does not have the precision of tone manipulaiton of either Photoshop or Lightzone. Indeed, use Lightroom to make automatic, general tonal adjustment to get the equivalent of a good negative, and then export the in tiff format for further adjustment and "burning" and "dodging" (using "regions") in Lightzone.

 

I've also tried Raw Developer (a Mac-only program) which has excellent colour-to-B&W conversion facility and good rendering. Sometimes I can get better results with Raw Developer, but of the 22 pictures on the site below, I've done 17 with Lightzone and 5 with Raw Developer:

 

Flickr: Photos from malland

 

[Warning for children: the pictures on the above site are all taken with the Ricoh GR-D]

 

—Mitch/Bangkok

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Guest stnami

LightZone (RT) has better integration with Lightroom as you can do a straight edit of a copy with lightroom adjusments in the same file and is cheaper than the full version

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