LightZone 3.6 Basic Edition: A Photo Experimentation Tool

LightZone 3.6 Basic Edition from Light Crafts is a $129.95 photo processing application. I bought it as part of the recent MacUpdate Promo Bundle for $49.95 (for the entire bundle). Light Craft also produces what they call a Full edition that permits multi-image editing and batch processing. I've been pretty happy using Pixelmater and the Open Source The GIMP image editors. So, I wasn't sure I needed or wanted to add another image editor to my toolkit. However, since it came as part of the bundle, I decided to take a look at LightZone and I'm glad I did now.

The browser has, perhaps, the simplest and easiest to use navigation system I've seen on a Mac. It basically shows you the top of the directory tree and lets you drill down to where you want to go without much effort. I was able to quickly browse through large thumbnails of JPG, PNG, and RAW image files. The RAW photos were created using either a Canon PowerShot G3 or G9.

The editor view is well laid out with the preset Styles in the left menu bar and modifications for each setting in the right menu bar. I suspect, though, that LightZone is one of those apps where I can do 90% of what I need knowing only 10% (or less) of what the application can actually do. Here are the few things that I did need to know about its interface. The thumbnail at the top left provides a quick preview of a Style without actually committing the chagne. The thumbnail at the top right that shows zone areas can also display color mask, histogram, and what they call Sampler information. Sampler provides information about the specific pixel under the cursor: XY position, RGB color, saturation, etc. The right sidebar builds control panels as you apply each style. The interesting thing here is that you can adjust any of the applied style independent of when each one was applied. This is quite different from the other editors that require you undo the most recent changes before going back to a previous modificiation type.

The Orig button in the top menu bar shows the original image before any Style changes were applied. And, speaking of the original image, it is important to note that LightZone never changes the original file. The modified image is saved out to a new file with a _lzn appended to the part of the file name that precedes a period. For example, if you brought in a photo from your camera named IMG_1234.JPG, LightZone would save the modified file to IMG_1234_lzn.JPG.

Here are a few photos I used to learn more about LightZone.

The candy was photographed without removing the plastic cover. The blurred bands at the top and bottom are the frosted part of the plastic cover. I used this to learn the different ways LightZone could emphasize colors.

I though the tree bark should more textured and 3D. So, I used this photo to learn more about LightZone's sharpening and dynamic range styles.

I neglected to turn on my flash for this photo of my daughter's rabbit. So, I used it when playing with LightZone's dynamic range and color tone styles to try to correct it a bit.

The main thing I learned is that LightZone does not "compete" with my other tools (Pixelmator or The GIMP). It probably doesn't do anything I couldn't do with Pixelmator or GIMP. But, its relighting tool and various Styles let me quickly experiment with the look of each photo. Each single change in LightZone probably would have required a dozen individual tweaks in my other photo editing tools. I'm still using Pixelmator and The GIMP for day-to-day photo tweaks and screen capture manipulation for my various blogging/writing projects. But, LightZone is the tool I'm probably going to turn to when I want to figure out how to make a photo look the way I remember a scene (or to improve on it). I don't use Apple Aperture or Adobe Lightroom. But, I suspect users of those photo management apps might want to give LightZone a try too.