The UI is divided into two separate sections: the “Browse” window for navigating files and the “Edit” window for working with specific images. LightZone has a clean and stylish user interface with a dark gray theme that you can also see in other popular image editing applications. In other words, the program acquired support for many DSLRs that have been released since 2011. The truth is that 2013-version is identical to that released in 2011 with upgraded RAW profiles being the only difference. However, in 2013, the program appeared again, but under a BSD open source license.
Six years later, the developer company stopped upgrading and releasing the soft.
The software first appears in 2005 and was advertised as a commercial program. In such a way, your original pictures are left intact, so you can return to them if such a necessity arises. The biggest advantage of the program that I’d like to highlight in my LightZone review is non-destructive photo processing. Though there are some similarities with Adobe product, you still need to consider distinct differences.
On December 19, 2007, LightZone was awarded a MacWorld's 23rd Annual Editors' Choice Award.LightZone is a RAW converter and open source photo editor that resembles Lightroom and can be downloaded free of charge. Additionally, since transformations always begin with the original RAW image rather than an intermediate JPEG version, JPEG compression related editing artifacts are avoided. Indeed, the same transformations can be easily reordered and additional transformations applied subsequently to yield further image improvements. LightZone outputs JPEG files which contain metadata references to the original image file location and a record of the transformations applied during editing.īecause the JPEG output files that LightZone creates contain the entire transformation history, edits can always be undone in a new edit session, long after they were saved. By being non-destructive LightZone preserves the original "digital negative" which contains the maximum information originally captured by the camera, and allows additional images with different transformations to be produced from the original. When LightZone edits an original digital image, a new resulting post-edit image file is created (for example a new JPEG copy) and the original image file is left unaltered. It treats the digital image original (typically a RAW file) as precious and non-editable. LightZone is a non-destructive RAW editor. Once created, a style is easily applied to multiple images, allowing those standard camera compensations to be applied to every image before the photographer ever views or edits it.
Using styles, photographers make and save their own preferred compensations for each RAW image based upon camera specific characteristics. LightZone can create and apply pre-determined image transformations, called "styles", to an entire batch of images in a single operation. LightZone edits both RAW and JPEG format images. While effectively identical in terms of features to the previous proprietary version (v3.9.x) this release was cast as v4.0.0 to distinguish it as the first under the free BSD-3-Clause license.
In June 2013, new packages of LightZone were released for Linux, Mac OSX, and Microsoft Windows platforms. On 22 December 2012, the LightZombie domain was redirected to the new site, and an announcement was made by Anton Kast (one of the original authors of LightZone) that they had negotiated to release the original LightZone source as free software. On-going LightZone support, including updates to let LightZone process Raw files from new camera models, was being provided by the volunteer LightZombie Project.
The final version from Light Crafts was version 3.9, except for Mac OS X which had a bug-fix version 3.9.2. It was reported that Fabio Riccardi, founder of Light Crafts and the primary developer of LightZone, was now working as an Apple employee, as evidenced by his LinkedIn profile.
In mid-September, 2011, the Light Crafts website went offline without notice. Although the Linux version was free of charge in earlier versions, its price was adapted with the 3.5 release. Versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux were available commercially.