Photography: Why Lightzone® Will Have To Go!
Those of you who read here regularly will know that for a month I’ve experimented with Lightzone®. It is a RAW editor produced by Lightcrafts and it has an unusual front-end and some potentially useful features.
It seems to me, however, that the same advice may be applied to RAW editors as that applied to cameras i.e. get a good one and then thoroughly learn how to use it.
For better, or worse, I am getting more and more competent using Bibble Pro®. It has also a batch processing option, (which enables you to correct one image in a group of images and then apply the settings to all other images in the batch). Lightzone® cannot currently achieve this.
The point about Bibble’s tools, those of Lightzone®, and for that matter Adobe’s own Lightroom® editors is that they reduce the amount of time needed to post process in an image editor such as Adobe Photoshop®. In my experience, however, they are rarely a substitute for final corrections in Photoshop, and indeed in the example above correcting in Bibble® and Photoshop® was speedier than doing the entire processing in Lightzone®.
In this instance I processed the RAW file in Bibble twice to produce a dark layer and one of ‘normal’ tonality. Then using a soft, broad brush in Photoshop I simply erased the areas of the lighter layer that I wished to de-emphasise. As I erased the darker layer was revealed, in this instance, making the background seem darker than Amazon’s face.
The result is nice too.
Another rendition of the classic image!
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November 1st, 2007 at 8:01 pm
“It has also a batch processing option, (which enables you to correct one image in a group of images and then apply the settings to all other images in the batch). Lightzone® cannot currently achieve this.”
Actually, Lightzone does have batch processing capabilities-
1) I can select multiple photos in the browser view and convert file type, compression, bit depth, color profile, dimensions…
2) I can apply any number of tools/operations to an image, which can then be applied to a set of other images (Copy/Paste Tools), or saved as a Custom Style.
These functions are available in the Full version of LZ, not the Basic.
November 1st, 2007 at 10:47 pm
My mistake,
I was testing the Basic version.
To be fair, I enjoyed Lightzone, but that’s not the same as being able to justify purchasing it. After all I also enjoyed Lightroom, and I enjoyed taking pictures with my Leica IIIa, even though none came out!
Lightzone is intriguing. I agree with many other reviewers, it would be nice as a PS Plug-In.
Stephen