Lightzone. How many people use it

http://www.lightcrafts​.com/products/lightzon​e/

Found this the other day. How many people use it and what do you think of it?

You might want to check out the lightzone forums...

http://www.lightcrafts​.com …/search.php?sea​rchid=4277

I don't have any experience with it, but you can download a trial version and see if you prefer it to Lightroom or Aperture.

http://www.lightcrafts​.com/index.php

I use CS2, lightroom and having a play with light zone. Give us more than one choice

weka2000 wrote in post #2846873
I use CS2, lightroom and having a play with light zone. Give us more than one choice

The video tutorial on the site is interesting. Keeps adjustments pretty simple but very effective. I haven't downloaded and installed the trial, but I might just to give it a go. How does it compare to LR so far?

Lord_Malone wrote in post #2847814
The video tutorial on the site is interesting. Keeps adjustments pretty simple but very effective. I haven't downloaded and installed the trial, but I might just to give it a go. How does it compare to LR so far?

Lightroom easier to understand. Might help if I read the lighzone manual

I will chime in on this one. For me, LightZone is tremendous software. The range of tonality control within specific areas of the picture it gives you is outstanding. I will agree LR is probably easier to understand because it is modeled after every other RAW converter. Just look at all of the develop modules in the raw converters - they are essentially the same globally. Now first off, I am not saying anything negative against any other of the other RAW converters - they just look the same globally - I know they do different things - also workflow requirements for each individual are important.

I spent about two months trying different converters - CI, DxO, Bibble, Lightroom, LightZone - compared to my "free" converters - DPP and RSE. When it came time to put money on the table, I bought LightZone because it fit "my needs" better than the others. As well, I had no experience working with RAW photos so I had no "comfort level" to break so to speak (now, I wished I had been doing RAW instead of JPG for the last 3 years)

LightZone is the unconventional one out there and you do have to play around with it. When you read the help files, they tell you what each thing does and you have to play around to see what you can do with the various combinations. For me, it just wasn't an overnight experience and I still don't know a lot of the fine detail about it.

So all I can say is download it and try it. It can be resource intensive for a 1 gig machine, but it does OK for me. But then again, I don't make a living from photography - I just spend money on it.

Rudy

i finally bought it and LOVE it. i've been downloading trial copies for a while and when the latest version hit (the one avail now) and bought it. the two things that are OUTSTANDING in my opinion are: regions and zone mapper. these two parts of LZ are the two most intuitive things i've come across in graphical user interfaces. it's fairly sophisticated behind the scenes with color space building images from raw, this is not a fly by night company. that said however, i still prefer raw conversion and sharpening in capture one LE. i export to 16 bit TIF and then use LZ to dial in everything else. i don't get into massive raw work flow (and i'm not a pro) so i only got the basic edition. C1 LE fills the bill for me for conversion and marking/deleting images. the latest version has the "spot" tool which allows me to remove dust spots and that's what finally pushed me over the edge in terms of buying it.

I use it and I love it, I also got the lightroom but I rather use the lightzone. I presently use the ver. 3.