| Developer(s) | Light Crafts |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 3.9 |
| Operating system | Linux, Mac OS X and Windows XP |
| Type | Photo Post-Production |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | Light Crafts, Inc. |
LightZone is a digital photo editor software application from Light Crafts. Its main purpose is to handle the workflow when handling images in various RAW formats. It's comparable to Adobe Systems's Photoshop Lightroom.
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Versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are available commercially. Although the Linux version was free of charge[1] in earlier versions, its price was adapted with the latest 3.5 release.
In mid-September, 2011, the Light Crafts web site went totally offline without notice. It is reported that Fabio Riccardi, founder of Light Crafts and the primary developer of LightZone, is now working as an Apple employee, as evidenced by his LinkedIn profile.
LightZone edits both RAW and JPEG format images.
LightZone can create and apply pre-determined image transformations, called "styles", to an entire batch of images in a single operation. Using styles, photographers make and save their own preferred compensations for each RAW image based upon camera specific characteristics. 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.
LightZone is a non-destructive RAW editor. It treats the digital image original (typically a RAW file) as precious and non-editable. 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. 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.
LightZone outputs JPEG files which contain meta data references to the original image file location and a record of the transformations applied during editing.
Because 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. Indeed, the same transformations can be easily reordered and additional transformations applied subsequently to yield further image improvements. Additionally, since transformations always begin with the original RAW image rather than an intermediate JPEG version, JPEG compression related editing artefacts are avoided.