LightZone Photo Editing Software

To say that the photographic editing market has been dominated by a certain large company for almost the entire history of digital photography would be a bit of an understatement, but it's been hard for companies to gain any traction in the market when competing against an 800-lb. gorilla.

Yet there are those who yearn for a different, simpler approach to digital photography than the one offered in Adobe Photoshop. After all, the creative tools of the darkroom were relatively simple, and master printers turn out great images with nothing more than an enlarger, a set of dials, and a piece of cardboard to serve as a dodging tool.

Into this landscape comes LightZone (which runs ably on both Mac and Windows machines), a creative new software approach to photographic editing that will be immediately familiar to anyone schooled in the Zone System, and easily learned by anyone who has even rudimentary Photoshop skills. This might sound like an exaggeration, but I learned most of what I needed to know about the program during a ten-minute demo at a trade show.



Polygon Feathers

LightZone's interface is split into two panes: the left column where image controls live, and the right column, where images reside. The same interface acts as both a browser and the main editing environment, eliminating the need to jump between applications in order to find the photograph you're looking for.

The image being edited occupies its region without floating palettes, windows or dialogue boxes that pop up to crowd the space. Instead they all live neatly in the left column. (This will be distracting for some, those used to having commands available without a long trip across a big screen to get to a selection).

Global corrections are simple to make. Users have the ability to correct an image with nearly a dozen tools. The most useful is the ZoneMapper, a digital iteration of the image analysis tool created by Ansel Adams and used by scores of photographers. As one drags a cursor over the ZoneMapper a thumbnail preview lights up, displaying the image regions related to that zone. Want to lighten all the parts of the image in the fifth zone? Simply click and drag upwards on the ZoneMapper to do so.

LightZone doesn't just do zone adjustment, it handles all the usual suspects: contrast, sharpness, blur, hue/saturation, color balance, color cast, white balance, channel mixer, noise reduction and cloning. For raw images the program also provides tools for managing the color of the raw conversion and another zone tool for mapping color values in a raw file.

However, the strength of the program is not simply that it can perform global corrections, but rather the way in which localized corrections can be made. In most photo-editing programs, users must create complicated masks or selections in order to isolate areas to be corrected. The labor-intensive creation of paths is one of the most challenging aspects of photo retouching.

LightZone takes a different approach entirely, relying on a polygon-based tool that quickly defines a region to be adjusted. Users simply click a series of points around the section of the image that needs correction, the program connects the dots and creates a masked region; the whole process takes just a few seconds. Regions can be created with a polygon, a spline or a Bezier curve that creates an egg-shaped selection area that encircles the selected region. Each curve has an outer border and an inner edge, the latter being the point at which feathering begins.

Since most localized photographic corrections occur at a point where two contrasting sections meet (a darkly lit foreground against a brighter background, for example), this adjustable feathering region allows for an image correction that looks more natural than any hard-edged selection ever could.

In practice this approach is creative genius. Many photographs that would require endless tweaking in Photoshop's QuickMask mode can be adjusted in a few seconds with results on par with, or better than, those created by mucking about in mask painting tools.

Sadly though, this approach doesn't work for things such as silhouetting an image or creating composites, and it's a shame because any time a photographer has to leave one tool to perform something with another tool it slows down the workflow (and makes it more likely the user will just stay in the other program).



Interface Elements

Despite the program's obvious mantra about simplicity, there are a few things in the user-interface area that need a bit more refinement or a rethinking. In one example, the power of the ZoneMapper is hindered by the way it is implemented. Currently, moving the cursor over the ZoneMapper panel shows the zones in a thumbnail, but it would be much more powerful if dragging a tool over the actual image showed the zone on the ZoneMapper, totally eliminating the need to squint at a thumbnail to try to guess zone boundaries.

We would also like to suggest that the Bezier tools automatically deselect after drawing a shape. We've (often) accidentally created massive and inaccurate editing regions by clicking somewhere on the non-photographic region of the editing pane and then clicking on a program in the background. We'd suggest the UI to treat a single click on the polygon selector to enable a single-use while a double-click leaves the mode "stuck" on.

Still, the program is young, and has time to enhance the few misses in the interface. The benefits of having an distraction free interface makes up for the interface problems exhibited by the application.

The company's level of attention is impressive as well. Between when we first saw the program and when we sat down to review it, two months later, three (free) updates had been released. The developers are clearly hard at work tweaking code and improving performance. In fact, the version before the release we tested was too slow to tackle RAW images from cameras like our 1Ds Mark II (and that's one of the reasons we waited to test it), but this new version moves along at a fast clip.



Future Perfect?

It's not clear if LightZone will ever be able to completely replace something like Photoshop, or even if it wants to. For a 1.x release of a program, it's a fantastic success, but as mentioned earlier there are some things the program just can't do. The software toolbox of the average photographer is already so full of Photoshop supplements that it's often hard to squeeze in one more, regardless of how powerful or how easy-to-use it is.

Currently, simplicity is the program's strength; it's what sets it apart from the competition and the power underneath that simple interface is what allows it to compete with the big boys. Time will tell where this clever application heads. There's a class of photographers who never need to create multiple layers, sophisticated silhouettes or push pixels around airbrush-style. For many, it's a great first step?an editing environment that's more facile than others but one that'll require trips to another program to finish the job. But for those photographers, looking just to make their final photographs look as beautiful in printed output as they do in the mind's eye, LightZone is a great program.



LightZone Photo Editing Software

www.lightzone.com

Pros: Simple interface, powerful image correction tools that don't require a lot of training.

Cons: UI could use some work, not enough features for many photographers.

Price: $249.95