LightZone comes with a learning curve and will take some time to get acquainted to. Yet, Adobe's solution is much easier to learn, with loads more automatic effects, styles and what not. All in all, LightZone is much more flexible than Lightroom, even more powerful than Photoshop in some areas. Now the exact same manipulation stack will be applied to each image in your selection.Īdditionally, while in Edit mode, you will find simple retouching functions in LightZone, such as a tool to clone certain parts of an image or a red eyes removal tool. Simply select any image with the desired tool stack, click the icon "Stack", select any number of other images and click "Tool". If you want to apply a tool stack to a batch of images, you can easily do so from the Browse section. The Edit section offers the flexible manipulation tools I'm talking about. The Browse section lets you scroll through your images quickly, see meta data. Just like Lightroom and Darktable, LightZone consists of two main areas. Once finished you should export a TIFF or standard JPEG in full resolution, which is perfectly easy. The LightZone JPEG always contains the whole tool stack you invoked on the given image. LightZone's working format is JPEG with alterations. JPEG and TIFF can also be opened directly. Speaking of originals, LightZone is able to directly read RAW files from the most common sources without the need for a separate "intermediate" converter. Before LightZone After LightZone: One Single Click With one important difference: Unlike Instagram, LightZone does not destroy your originals. Friends of Instagram and other filter effects will also feel at home here. You could HDR any image by choosing one of the pre-made styles easily. Styles allow you to run effects with a single click. My favorite feature is LightZone's big selection of ready-made styles. To avoid hard lines, the feature automatically works with a feathering area around the shape to have the areas in- and outside the shape blend into each other smoothly. Once you've drawn a vector shape, any effect you invoke will only affect the are inside the shape. This feature allows you draw vector shapes along the objects you want to be processed separately. Generally, if you want effects to only affect part of an image, you will definitely like the concept of vector-based regions and masks. Relighting can be invoked on the whole or only on parts of the photo. This feature lets you change the lighting of an image as though the image were taken in a different lighting setting. This is pretty unique, yet needs a while of experimenting to get an idea of what LightZone is able to do for you.Īnother great feature is LightZone's Relighting. Each step can be re-ordered in the stack list to make for a different effect. Each step can be made undo by simply closing the stacked item. Speaking of stacking, LightZone generally stacks effects, tools, any manipulation step upon the one before. This way you could change brightness and contrast separately. You can stack Zone Mappers, which allows for multiple, even finer manipulation results. Moving zones up brightens the image, moving them down darkens the image. You simply move zones up or down in the list-like hierarchy. This makes manipulations fairly easy to handle and smooth at the same time.īelow the so-called Zone Finder there is a so-called Zone Mapper. Each zone differs 50% in brightness from the zone before and after it. Each image is separated into 16 different zones, representing areas of the image where brightness reigns. Instead LightZone heavily relies on the concept of "zones". There are no curves to adjust, there is no contrast dial either. In Lightroom you are limited to the more basic features. This concept would make it possible to stack layers upon each other with each layer carrying a different effect, be it saturation changes, brightness, contrast, whatever. The most common tool, Adobe's Lightroom, didn't inherit the concept of adjustment layers from Photoshop. Duplicating a layer to preserve the original is the common way to go. Manipulation directly affects the pixels. Usually there are layers, there are color maps, there are masks and what not. If you know your ways around photo editors, you'll know the basics on how photo manipulation works. LightZone: Non-Destructive and Zone-Based The most enthralling thing is, it works totally different from anything you know. The formerly commercial, now Open Source tool LightZone will really excite you. Today we have an even greater solution for you. A while ago, we already introduced you to a free competitor of Adobe's commercial solution, Darktable (which is great). Adobe Lightroom is what people inside the Photoshop universe will recommend you. If you want to do quick everyday photo manipulations on a bunch of images, you will usually not go for Photoshop.
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