People who are involved professionally with images, such as commercial and art photographers, but also advertising firms’ creative departments, and creative departments in corporate organisations: ask them which image editor they use, and they’ll almost invariably tell you “Photoshop of course”. But some companies believe they can do better and deliver a better tool set for image fine-tuning. LightCrafts is such a company. It developed LightZone, an application that will make photos better, correct them, enhance them, and do it better than Photoshop. Or so LightCrafts say.

You’ve got to give it to them: the people at LightCrafts aren’t afraid of a challenge. Adobe Photoshop is probably the oldest and most appreciated image editor around. Saying that you can improve on this powerhouse is bound to stir some emotions. Or perhaps not emotions, but the interest of journalists who want to see if your product isn’t just another over-hyped piece of junk. Well, I can safely say it’s not a piece of junk, but I can just as safely say Adobe shouldn’t wet its pants --yet.

LightZone 3.1 --the current version-- is a powerful image editor. I received the full version that also has some image asset management functionality. My first impressions of the product were that it would be better if I compared it with Photoshop Lightroom instead of with Photos Extended. After all, Photoshop allows you to do much more than correct and enhance images. You can create cut outs in Photoshop, apply creative filters to images, and do a lot of things you can’t do with LightZone --or Lightroom for that matter.

Ansel Adams Exposure Zone System

So, I tested LightZone against Lightroom, and that proved to be a fair comparison. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom also delivers image asset management functionality, has powerful photo enhancement and correction features, and virtually no creative capabilities by itself.

LightZone has all those things, but the underlying concept differs, and it’s the concept that makes the application unique. LightZone is based on the differences that you find in an image; differences in light quality and quantity, not pixels, as the LightCrafts people say themselves. LightZone indeed has a tool that directly refers to this concept. It’s called the ZoneMapper and it works somewhat like Ansel Adams’ zone system.

Another unique feature in LightZone is the region tool. That one looks better than Photoshop’s selection tool, is vector based, can be dragged around, includes a feathering zone, can be made “live” again at any time, and just plain works more intuitively. With LightZone you also never have to convert from Camera RAW to anything else. LightZone’s edits are non-destructive and “saving” automatically creates either a JPEG or a TIFF image. But that’s not so terribly unique --Lightroom is non-destructive as well.

But let’s start the review with LightZone’s browser. Although LightZone Full claims to manage your images, in reality it uses the folders that you have saved your images into as its basic storage repository. There’s no possibility to create a catalogue or a library with different collections or grouping of images. Stacking images together is possible in LightZone, but it’s your responsibility and a manual affair. Stacking based on the time period within which photos have been taken (in burst mode, for example) is not available.

To be quite honest, I found the Browse part of LightZone to be too lightweight when compared to the power of the Editing section of the program. It’s a shame the developers don’t spend more attention to this part of this otherwise great application. In fact, only if you really don’t have Aperture, iPhoto or Lightroom on your machine, would I recommend buying the LightZone Full version, which includes the Browser part. And I can’t imagine any serious photographer not having at least one of those applications on his system.

Camera RAW Non-Destructive Processing

Luckily, the Edit section of the Full version was a lot more appealing. LightZone edits all photos in Camera RAW and without the need for conversion. The edits are fully non-destructive. First of all, as with any other RAW capable application I’ve tested so far, LightZone doesn’t know a clue about native Hasselblad H3D images. Hasselblad users will have to convert to Adobe Digital Negative first.

With most other RAW formats LightZone has no problem. The Edit section has a column at the left where users can find pre-defined “styles”. These are sets of enhancements that have been saved to LightZone’s style format. Sets can be shared with others, which is a nice feature, especially for amateurs. Personally, I doubt if professional or semi-professional photographers would ever use this feature, although it can also serve as an automation tool: save a set and next time you have a similar project, just apply the styles and you’re done.

In short, styles can be great time savers, and as they can be saved without any extra steps at the end of any project, you don’t lose time over recording steps or actions and saving these, either. Correcting an image, saving the whole tool stack as a style is all it takes for a style to be available for later use and sharing with others. This being said, I must also styles could be a necessity as LightZone isn’t exactly a speed demon. Even on a Mac Pro Quad Core 3GHz, it takes its time to load an image…

LightZone’s most unique feature is its zones system. At the top left, users find a histogram, a sampler panel, a colour mask panel and a representation of their image in grayscale colours, with each grey level representing one of the zones.

Each RAW photograph has at least a RAW Tone Curve and a RAW Adjustments panel opened. The RAW Tone Curve panel is locked by default, but users can unlock it. The lock is there for a purpose: LightZone does a good job at interpreting the camera’s EXIF information, and so the default tone curve is best left alone. f you’re the adventurous type, you can play with it.