lightzone 3 is out

Hi
lightzone 3 is out

who does use/try lightzone 3 ?

i read a lot of good about it
i did download a trial verision , but didnot find any good stuff ...

I'll admit to being addicted to trying different RAW converters with different workflow strategies. I downloaded LightZone 3.0 trial, and here's some impressions:

1. LZ does an excellent job at auto white balance (AWB) interpretation from the RAW file metadata. Anecdotal opinion is LZ 3 is second only to Canon's DPP in this regard. PhotoShop ACR is poor at AWB on Canon .CR2 files.

2. The "Regions" instead of pixels workflow concept is an outstanding innovation. Easy to understand and use. I do not like editing and pushing pixels in pixel editing software. For example, lot of my PJ and ducmentary photos are under mixed available light, say people in a barn which has FL and incandescent lighting, with sunlight streaming in the doors. If you WB the FL lights, the streaming light is blue. If you WB the outdoor light, everyone in the barn has an ugly yellow-orange-green color cast. With LZ, you can define REGIONS and manage color casts WHILE STILL WORKING NON-DESTRUCTIVELY IN RAW SPACE. No pixel pushing. Works good in indoor sporting event photos under mixed light also. To do this in any other program, you would have to make different RAW conversions, & layer them in PhotoShop. Time and money wasted doing something I do not like. PhotoShop will lose a digital photographer money the moment you start pushing pixels.

3. I have not mastered LZ capture sharpening. It's there. The new PhotoShop ACR 4.1 release has the BEST G-damn Capture Sharpening I ever used in a RAW converter, so there will be no contest. But, at least LZ offers capture sharpening, which most other products do not (except PSCS ACR and now Bibble).

4. Selective Highlight and Shadow restoration, while still working non-destructively in RAW space is another strength of LZ 3. Canon DPP has NONE, and other good converters like PhotoShop ACR and Bibble have global, not selective restoration. It works effectively for fixing face shadows of a person wearing a cap outdoors in bright sun or in a landscape scenes, while still in RAW space. I think landscape photographers will like this feature built into the converter.

5. I'm not keen on the way settings are stored in a companion .jpeg file.

6. The non-destructive layer stacks are a GREAT way to work. I imagine this will be great for photographers who obsess over the quality of individual images, like landscapes. I'm just a grab and go documentary kind of person. Also, I must be the only person on the planet that does NOT like the captive database-workflow design of Adobe Lightroom. LZ 3 offers a whole different paradigm of working. It's nice to have alternatives. Competition is good.

7. This program demands a lot of computer CPU performance. It must be computation intensive.

Those are my impressions. I always end up falling back on PhotoShop ACR because of the workflow for large numbers of similar images, but I really like LZ 3.
I'd buy the version without the image mgt features because I use iView, and I'm not sure if I'll buy it LZ 3. How many darn RAW converters do I need. But, I do like it.

That's just me.
Jack

J Rabin wrote in post #3347562
Id go documentary kind of person.
Also, since I must be the only person on the planet that does NOT like the captive database-workflow design of Adobe Lightroom, LZ 3 offers a whole different paradigm of working. It's nice to have alternatives.

Jack

That will make it worth the upgrade alone. But is this a $$$ upgrade. We just bought the first!

I use LightZone as well. Since I first tried it back Christmas time and then bought it, it has undergone a lot of development and has improved much. The relighter tool/tonality control in v3, to me, is worth the price of admission, at least for the basic version when it comes out. It works very well in balancing difficult lighting conditions. I wished it was faster from a computational standpoint, but there is a lot going on there with it rendering the image both as a raw file along with the zone finder version of the image.

J Rabin wrote in post #3347562
I'll admit to being addicted to trying different RAW converters with different workflow strategies. I downloaded LightZone 3.0 trial, and here's some impressions:

1. LZ does an excellent job at auto white balance (AWB) interpretation from the RAW file metadata. Anecdotal opinion is LZ 3 is second only to Canon's DPP in this regard. PhotoShop ACR is poor at AWB on Canon .CR2 files.

2. The "Regions" instead of pixels workflow concept is an outstanding innovation. Easy to understand and use. I do not like editing and pushing pixels in pixel editing software. For example, lot of my PJ and ducmentary photos are under mixed available light, say people in a barn which has FL and incandescent lighting, with sunlight streaming in the doors. If you WB the FL lights, the streaming light is blue. If you WB the outdoor light, everyone in the barn has an ugly yellow-orange-green color cast. With LZ, you can define REGIONS and manage color casts WHILE STILL WORKING NON-DESTRUCTIVELY IN RAW SPACE. No pixel pushing. Works good in indoor sporting event photos under mixed light also. To do this in any other program, you would have to make different RAW conversions, & layer them in PhotoShop. Time and money wasted doing something I do not like. PhotoShop will lose a digital photographer money the moment you start pushing pixels.

3. I have not mastered LZ capture sharpening. It's there. The new PhotoShop ACR 4.1 release has the BEST G-damn Capture Sharpening I ever used in a RAW converter, so there will be no contest. But, at least LZ offers capture sharpening, which most other products do not (except PSCS ACR and now Bibble).

4. Selective Highlight and Shadow restoration, while still working non-destructively in RAW space is another strength of LZ 3. Canon DPP has NONE, and other good converters like PhotoShop ACR and Bibble have global, not selective restoration. It works effectively for fixing face shadows of a person wearing a cap outdoors in bright sun or in a landscape scenes, while still in RAW space. I think landscape photographers will like this feature built into the converter.

5. I'm not keen on the way settings are stored in a companion .jpeg file.

6. The non-destructive layer stacks are a GREAT way to work. I imagine this will be great for photographers who obsess over the quality of individual images, like landscapes. I'm just a grab and go documentary kind of person. Also, I must be the only person on the planet that does NOT like the captive database-workflow design of Adobe Lightroom. LZ 3 offers a whole different paradigm of working. It's nice to have alternatives. Competition is good.

7. This program demands a lot of computer CPU performance. It must be computation intensive.

Those are my impressions. I always end up falling back on PhotoShop ACR because of the workflow for large numbers of similar images, but I really like LZ 3.
I'd buy the version without the image mgt features because I use iView, and I'm not sure if I'll buy it LZ 3. How many darn RAW converters do I need. But, I do like it.

That's just me.
Jack

I was just looking at and considering LZ today for the first time and found this post. Thanks for taking the time to evaluate and write this very useful info. As a landscaper who is not interested in high volume image management features, this sounds like a serious consideration. /Dan

I bought LZ Basic 2, got a free upgrade to LZ Basic 3 (cos I read between the lines and had the audacity to ask them the question - wahey!).

Not played much with it but overall really really like it and will enjoy it much more when I start using it.

My only bugbear is the CPU -- I'm gonna need a new Mac for it as each event pauses a second or so (G4 PBook 1.25Gb and no other apps running, and application cache set to 1Gb). This is unworkable if I have a set of images to produce: slightly brighten. Pause. Too much. Slide to the left a tad. Pause. Darn - to the right a smidge. Pause. That just don't work. I have a cinema display, so an iMac will be pointless, and Mac Mini only goes up to 2Gb and may be discontinued [rumour]. So why don't you get a PC? Hell no!

LZ plugs into LR nicely but I think I'll move up to Full version and use instead of LR when I want to as an alternative to DPP - which is very good but lacks some essential functionality. The upshot of using any external editor from LR is a huge TIFF file every time. At 48Mb a pop, no thanks.

LZ gets a thumbs up from me and I'll gladly attempt to convert anyone that comes along.