LightZone review
When I heard about LightZone, my first reaction was, ‘Oh, another lame photo retouching program!’ I saw so many bad Photoshop killer wannabes that I lost confidence in them all. They claim they can do certain things better than Photoshop does, but they almost always fail. So, even though Photoshop is so expensive and it consumes so much resources, it is still irreplaceable to photographers. Or so I thought.
(Left) Original photo, (right) Photo retouched by LightZone.
Then I tried LightZone, and, I was quite impressed. LightZone only do one thing, and it does it very well. It improves the quality of photo in a significant way, and it is very easy to use. You can just select a preset (like, Clarity, Polarizer, Bright Scene), or apply Relight and play with parameters until you get the result you want. There is also ZoneMapper, which divides the picture into 16 zones, and lets you decide which zone has which value. For example, if your picture use only zone 3 to zone 14, then you can eliminate the lower and upper unused zones, and expand the middle zone, so that your picture can have richer range of colors.
Of course, you can do all that in Photoshop, but not only that Photoshop is expensive, but it is a very difficult program to learn. It has so many functionalities, and there are so many things that you can do with it, you have to spend endless hours just to learn a few useful tricks (by the way, if you are serious about improving your photos with Photoshop, read Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction by Dan Margulis. This book can be a little bit difficult to read, but full of very useful techniques and invaluable insights. In fact, I think anyone who wants to improve their photos digitally should read this book). So, I think it is a much better choice to use LightZone for image retouching than to struggle with learning how to use Photoshop. You can also use both programs.
LightCrafts, the maker of LightZone, provides very helpful tutorial videos and PDF files. They also provide fully functional 30-day demo, so you can download it and try it yourself.
If you are interested in buying it, MUPromo is selling a bundle of apps including LightZone at $49.99. Since LightZone itself costs $129.95, it is truly a good bargain! (LightZone will be only unlocked if MUPromo sells enough number of bundles. But I am quite sure the target sale will be reached).
