Just about a year ago I wrote a blog for Inside Lightroom that suggested considering using Light Craft's LightZone to further enhance the power of Lightroom with a non-destructive editing tool that could also do regional adjustments. You can pass a Lightroom file directly to LightZone and back, just as you can with passing files back and forth between Lightroom and Photoshop. Just recently, Light Craft has added important new features and added ease of use. One of them is that the program will now process RAW, TIF, and JPEG files non-destructively and can save the files back to Photoshop as a .TIF file.

One of the big advances in LightZone 3.4 is its equivalent of Lightroom pre-sets, called Styles. There are 7 Style Families and a total of 38 different styles. Then, as in Lightroom, you can save any combination of the adjustments you've made as a style... or even any combination of the styles that are already in the program. So the real number of possibilities is endless. You can save any of LightZone's very powerful adjustment possible, then it's only logical to assume there will eventually be some interesting free styles available from"how to" sites such as AccessDigitalPhotography (www.accessdigitalphotography.com).

Here are two interpretations of the same photo. The first was the best I could do in Lightroom,

The second was enhanced with a few clicks, using the styles in LightZone:

There's also a new command called Relight. You just click the command and you instantly see what is usually a fairly dramatic improvement in the way the picture looks. If you don't like that, you just click Relight again and you get yet another version. If you don't want the auto approach, you can also control the "relighting" with a Relight panel that has three sliders. Of course, you can go back and forth, so when you get what you like you can either enhance it with one of the program's other features or save it back to Lightroom. You can also save it in any of the popular photo file formats so that you can just immediately send it on to Photoshop or to your client.

One of the really helpful new features of LightZone is a direct steal from Lightroom: You can now instantly see the effect of a preset in a thumbnail when you pass your cursor over the name of the pre-set.
All this power isn't a good excuse to be sloppy with your original exposure. The more attention you pay to getting the widest range of detail and brightness in the first place, the more effective LightZone's enhancements are likely to really enliven your shots.

Now here, as far as I'm concerned, is the really intriguing part. You can very easily select and feather specific portions of the image so that any of the Styles or Commands work only within that area. So it's really easy to mix effects like the example you see below.

All I did was to select the background, apply a Relight to it, then used the Hue/Saturation command to "re-interpret" the foggy Golden Gate Bridge.

The program sells for $199.95. There's also a "basic" version that's only $99.95, but I haven't tested that one. It doesn't have Lighroom's 5 modules, though. Instead, it choose to apply its power to processing, special effects and regional processing.