Lightzone review by Dierk Haasis

Map It Out

Is this a good thing or a bad thing – more software to manipulate our photos.?

In the past, digital imaging was a complex process which involved shooting on film, getting the right picture from the light table, scanning it in (a complex process in itself, worthy of the magical doings and undoing's of the Middle Ages) before one could start to retouch and totally change anything the photographer put on film.

Then Photoshop came along.

It was a photographer’s application in name only, targeting graphic designers in advertising agencies, book and magazine publishing. Over the years it grew to be a behemoth, offering almost anything to everyone. When digital photography got more than just a foothold – only 2 years ago! – photographers became uneasy with the big one from Adobe: expensive, large memory footprint, loads and loads of features one needs not. And then, the RAW photos from the camera needed to be developed. A feat originally clearly delineated from putting out the resultant image. With digital both parts grew together.

Enter Intuitively

A small Californian company called LightCrafts set out to change the world of image editing. The sought a simple, intuitive program helping photographers instead of hindering them. It is not about the tool but the image. And born was LightZone.

It is based upon the relatively simple idea Ansel Adams used to get a full tonal range from b/w film, any photo is build up of different zones of lightness or tones. When we see a scene – or look at a picture – we don’t see curves, histograms or numerical values, we see hues, tones, light, shadow. So why do we change physical and mathematical concepts instead of going in, optimizing the photo as we think about it: ‘This must be a bit lighter, here I need some more shadow to get rid of distracting detail …’?

There are three main elements in the Editor View of LightZone 2.0 (in beta when I was testing and writing):

• the image preview
• the ZoneFinder, a map showing which parts of the image are in a specific tonal zone
• the ZoneMapper (or one of the other tools, see below).

Opening a RAW photo often gives you a special kind of ZoneMapper, the RAW ZoneMapper, applying some basic adjustment suitably for the format. As with a normal ZoneMapper you can change the zones here. It is a good idea to leave this mapper in peace, opening a normal one for further corrections because that way you will always have this basic adjustment and not start from scratch if something goes wrong. Mind that not all RAW formats have a RAW ZoneMapper, either they don't need any pre-adjustment or the format is not supported by LightCrafts. As long as you can open the file in LightZone you can adjust to its needs and your taste.

You choose the dividing line between two zones and drag it up or down, depending on what you want to achieve. If you want the image (or parts of it) to appear brighter, you drag up and vice versa. By choosing several dividers you can compress or expand specific zone areas quite easily. It is actually harder to describe what to do and what will happen than to do it. The ZoneMapper and several other tools also use blending modes - essentially the same as in Photoshop -, opacity, masks and inversion of masks:

What's in a Region?

Until now it seems LightZone is just another of those global-correction-image converters but there's a catch, masking in the form of Regions. For every tool you open you can define a number of regions the tool's settings will be applied to. It should be mentioned here that you stack the tools, that is they are applied like layers you put upon one another, and that you can have as many ZoneMappers (and other tools) as you like.

A region consists of its outer boundary, a feather belt and the inner area on which the effect of the tool is full. Again the developers went for intuitive usage. Instead of defining the feather belt numerically beforehand, you get a dragable boundary, which can easily be adjusted until your effect is subtly interwoven with the original image. With blending modes and opacity slider you get all the flexibility needed without any complicated menus, dialogue boxes or number crunching.

In the edit menu you find four entries allowing copying [complex] regions from one tool to the next. Paste Region Linked lets you change a region associated with one tool in another, that is, resizing the region or feather belt will be adapted throughout all secondary tools it belongs to.

Toolbox

Let's have a quick check of what tools LightZone brings with it.

The program offers two separate tool bars, which, in my opinion, are not necessarily ordered logically. Why, for instance, are the crop and rotate tools on the more general tool bar? Even worse is the order of the second bar, which has the ZoneMapper as the first tool, sharpen relatively close to it but white balance hidden in the middle? Even if you know quite well how a proper work-flow should look like - white balance first, tonal corrections, probably rotating and cropping next, healing/cloning before sharpening - the order of a tool bar easily gets the better of you. It should be noted that LightZone's user interface, particularly the fixed and short tool bars, is far superior to what Nikon capture NX offers.

Most tools are self-explanatory at least with the labels I stuck on.

• Show Proof - let's you select colour profile and rendering intent; shows how the result looks with these applied
  
  
  
• Region Tools - you can draw Bezier curves, spline curves or straight lines
• Hide/Show Regions - to evaluate ones changes on the fly its is better to hide regions
• Contrast Mapper - essentially the same as Shadow/Highlight in Photoshop CS/CS2 or the Fill Light tool in RAW Shooter and Lightroom

One tool is not on either bar or in the menu, the hand tool to drag the zoomed in picture around. LightZone uses the Photoshop standard, hold the space bar and you can drag around your photo.

Non-destructive Editing

It's not just a buzz-word, non-destructive editing is the future. It gives us, the photographers and graphic designers, all the freedom we want. Any [standard image] file we throw at LightZone can be adjusted, optimised, retouched - and it stays untouched. Like other programs LZ creates a very small file with instructions on what to do; this file takes up much less room than any TIFF or JPEG we might create for different purposes. It is even possible to save several instruction files for one image! The downside to this is that there is still not enough digital asset management applications out on the market handling sidecar files gracefully. What we need is a file browser or database-driven DAM for which we define what files belong together and should be handled together. Even then an image file with different sidecars could be a problem if the names are different (necessary if you want to have several LZN instruction sets for one image). Only recently did I discover the great advantage of instruction sidecars, instead of sending around all the big file renditions a client may need, you simply send a copy of the original and your instruction sets. This comes in very handy with contextual challenges as Digital Outback Photo does them from time to time, and with corrections to your initial optimization for, say, a magazine.

One tool LightCrafts adds to non-destructive editing is spot healing/cloning. For reasons beyond me Adobe has not been able to implement this in Lightroom although often asked for. I am actually unaware of any other image editor capable of cloning without destructing the original data. Several people, including a high-ranking official of LightCrafts told me they do not find the clone tool that helpful, it does not achieve satisfying results. The main problem may be the way we have been trained to retouch by stamping out defects. LightZone goes the same route with the two clone tools as it does with others: define a region.

Upon the first click with the clone tool in the image a source target is set. You then go about setting the points for the region covering the defect. The region and feather belt can be dragged and resized, a blending mode can be set. Currently cloning works best on rather small or on uniform areas.

What else?

Before version 2.0 LightZone used two separate windows for file browsing and editing. With the new version both are consolidated into one. Personally I liked the old way, where a simple click on a button switched me from one to the other or I could put the windows on separate monitors. The new design may be a bit more flexible when it comes to resizing panes or setting up the window to ones own liking. I am not too sure if this is really better than before. We are, after all, concentrating on the photos not on the tools at hand - one of the big advantages LZ has over other programs. Shifting panes, resizing them may be great on paper, even in a presentational context - 'doesn't this look cool?!' - but in everyday use it is superfluous at best (it's really distracting).

Beside the Editor View (see above) LightZone 2.0 features two further pre-defined views. In Browser View you have access to your directory structure, thumbnails and a preview of your images; metadata (EXIF, IPTC) are shown in the lower left corner.

All the panes are resizable by simply dragging the border between two elements; very like Adobe Bridge. The same holds for the Editor View and a combination of both, called Standard View.

You should be careful when resizing panes as I found that the pre-defined Views are overwritten by changes.

Beside just saving your instructions you can, obviously, export to TIFF or JPEG. As it should be the norm today, LZ allows you to define a colour profile for the exported file; it also maintains metadata from the original file, a feat not every converter seems to be at ease with [Capture NX consistently strips them]. This comes in handy if you just want a quick JPEG to go on-line, in a forum for instance.

During the 1.x release a second variant of LightZone became available, dropping the file browser. It is meant to lighten the memory load a bit if you are not interested in LZ coming with its own file access because you preferably work with iView MediaPro, BreezeBrowser or any other DAM. While the smaller footprint is welcome I found it not as useful as the full program since the Export feature was dropped; you could only save back.

Where's the accelerator?

Anybody a good explanation why complex programs like image editors and RAW converters are increasingly programmed upon tertiary environments? Capture NX works with Microsoft's .NET Framework, LightZone now uses Java. If this would only have consequences for the opening process - making it longer than necessary since first of all the framework has to be loaded - I'd be quite content. But it slows down the program considerably and ever more during long sessions! I also encountered intermittent crashes (with the release version 1.5 and 1.6), not often but from time to time, always associated with Java. Best thing about that: there's an automated sending of data to LightCrafts' developers.

I honestly hope LightCraft's will change the programming language in the not too distant future.

Conclusion

This is a fine program. Until I found it most of my RAW conversion and image editing was done with RAW Shooter|Premium, which left only composition and cloning to Photoshop - more than 95% of my images needs could be dealt with in RSP. I still use it for processing batches of images because that is one area in which LightZone is definitely far from the mark; the templates of version 2 are a step in the right direction. If the intermittent crashes and the slowness can be programmed out, LZ would easily be my weapon of choice in every aspect of image editing save composting. The results are easy to get and - from a work-flow perspective - faster than with Photoshop.

Highly recommended!