I tried quite a number of others before I settled on LightZone. “ is my only and preferred photo editor.The styles are also of use for me, and I like many of the black and white styles for printing.” - James L. Ease of use, elegance of tools - these are all places that LightZone shines. a joy to use, the non-destructive automatic layers, coupled with the tool's flexibility with opacity, blending modes, color/tonal selections and easy shape-based maskings, make the program much easier for me to get to a final desired print than do tools like Photoshop. The first print I got literally left me speechless for more than 30 minutes - I could only shake my head in consternation and awe when I thought of all the time it took me to get a similar result in a wet darkroom.” - William "Tex" Andrews, Baltimore, MD My results from printing - especially upscaling - have been breathtaking. Black and white conversion in LightZone is superb, and of course with the Zone System analogy and tone-mapping capabilities incredibly powerful. and that it really is more intuitive than other programs. A hugely important aspect of LightZone to me is how it can be as simple or as complex as the user desires. Along with the blending modes, there is just unbelievable power behind every single tool - and very easily accessed. I love the way the tool tabs have been added to nearly all the tools. I like that selective editing in LightZone is done with regions, similar to the way dodging and burning was done in the darkroom - I think it is a more "photographic" way of working. “I currently use LightZone as my editor because it does very close to everything I need my photo editor to do.If you've ever seen stunning black and white, HDR, or high contrast photos and wondered how you could achieve the same effects in your own work, wonder no more! With LightZone, you can implement any of those styles with a single click! You can even adjust the parameters and save your work as a "Style" that can be used again and again! Whether you work with RAW, JPEG, or TIFF images, LightZone is there to make your post-shoot production go smoothly and efficiently. You can also leverage the power of LightZone to boost overall color, correct color shifts and white balance errors, selectively sharpen or blur images or parts of images, remove dust spots and reduce the noise often found in high-ISO digital images. Even better, you can adjust up to 16 exposure values, either individually or as a group.
For example, you can use LightZone to adjust exposure values in your digital photos using a simple slider. LightZone lets you perform many of the most popular photo tweaks and adjustments in a snap. Thanks to LightZone, photography buffs can regain control over photo retouching and enhancement, getting things done simply, naturally, and quickly! If I finally decide on a new Camera that supports RAW format, it might push me over the edge to plunk even more money down on some better editing software.Sure, the advent of computers and digital photo editing has unlocked millions of creative things to do with your pictures, but sometimes you don't want to be forced to learn editing languages or review mathematical graphs just to make a shot look the way you want it to. I still have not decided, but LightZone is looking pretty good right now. I don’t know about that, but it did win Best of Show at Macworld Expo 2006.
The negative info I could find was a review on VersionTracker that claimed the software was too slow because it was written in Java. There is also an apparent user base out there too. While I have a couple thousand photos in iPhoto, I don’t usually need to compare rolls of photos from a photo-shoot. Now this seems much more useful to some one like me than Aperture. If I was a good photographer I wouldn’t need touch-ups. In fact I take pretty average pictures which is why I want some software to make them look better.
I was browsing through my local Apple store carrying around a copy (the LAST copy) of Aperture and “Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture (Apple Pro Training Series)” like I was ready to make the purchase.