LightZone 2.0 is yet another intuitive RAW editing tool, but it’s actually a powerful tool to consider…

The best feature to me is the ZoneMapper tool… ZoneMapper allows you to adjust the brightness and contrast of all or parts of your photo for any combination of the highlights, midtones, or shadows.

Now I am a big fan of Nikon Capture NX, which also allows to apply your adjustment to “zones” very specifically, that coming from Nikon, it’s a hard task to beat them at their own game but LightZone actually did it!!

LightZone organizes the tools used to edit your photo into a stack similarly to “layers” in other applications.

Within the tools, LightZonz uses regions to create Vector-Based Regions and Masks (and that’s a big difference compared to NX…) you can restrict a tool’s effect to just specific areas of your photo. A mask is the set of regions for a particular tool.

The control points of a region determine its shape and are used to adjust it.

The points are marked by small, white circles. For example, the region shown on the right has three control points (there is no significance to the order.) There is no limit to the number of control points a region may have.

LightZone always works in a 16-bit linear color space to take full advantage of the RAW files.

Unlike a non-linear gamma-corrected color space, a linear color space doesn’t introduce errors (such as increasing noise, edge distortion, and hue shifts) during enhancement operations such as sharpening, blurring, or saturation adjustments.

For those who have to deal with many different kind of RAW (Nikon, Canon, etc.), LightZone deals with all of them without problem, ncluding TIFs, JPEGs and LightZone can also open Adobe‚Ñ¢ DNG files.

Now, I’ve said that LightZone actually does better than Capture NX… Here is a small test.

As you can see, besides the saturation that’s easy to fix, a simple export from LightZone and NX (no corrections whatsoever) produces different results.

If you look at the green zones I’ve mapped (feel free to save this image and zoom at 200% to see more details), you’ll see why I was surprised to see that NX was kinda failing at its task, being Nikon’s proprietary too and what not!

Another great feature about LightZone, you don’t have to re-learn another tool…

Well, not really. LightZone can be integrated into Photoshop Lightroom, Aperture, Bibble and Capture One!

Meaning you can load your photos into your favorite editor and when needed, use the powerful adjustment tools LightZone provides…