Lightzone Free for Linux!!!!!!!

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Bryan Lee

Expat Street Photographer
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If you have one or two gigs of ram and are currently using Linux for your operating system or even duel booting here is a late Christmas present for you!

Here is the direct link to the download and the answer/question generic linux site.


Linux.com
The Enterprise Linux Resource
http://www.linux.com/
Title LightZone for Linux delivers commercial quality photo conversion for free
Date 2007.02.14 4:01
Author StoneLion
Topic
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/02/07/1930237​

Like many companies, Light Crafts releases its flagship application -- the RAW photo converter LightZone -- for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. But although the Windows and OS X versions of LightZone cost hundreds of dollars, the Linux version is absolutely free. It is a lucky break, too, because LightZone is a powerful tool that bests many of its expensive competitors on both quality and ease of use.

The LightZone Web site focuses on the commercial products; to get the Linux build you must visit a separate page maintained by Light Crafts' Anton Kast. Kast is the company's chief architect, was the first employee, and is a die-hard Fedora Linux user. LightZone is written in Java and was designed from day one to be cross-platform, so when Kast started work on it, he did so on his platform of choice, all the while making sure that the Linux builds worked just as well as those for proprietary operating systems.

The current Linux bundle (version 2.1) weighs in at a hefty 25MB, thanks to the included Java runtime. (The company used to provide both bundled-runtime and standalone versions of the app, but found that the standalone versions were causing more problems than they solved.) When the download is complete, you can untar the file to any location on your system and launch it with ./LightZone.

Here is where it gets interesting. If you have used a RAW photo app before (such as Bibble or Raw Therapee, for instance), then you probably expect to see a glut of slider controls filling up every spare inch of vertical screen real estate, broken up by a few check boxes and spin buttons. LightZone doesn't stoop that low. Instead, it gives you a sparse toolbar of adjustment functions. You can stack as many of them onto the image as you want, rearrange them, disable them, even remove them. All adjustments are reversible, and nothing touches the original file.

Most RAW converters give you one control for each possible image feature -- white balance, exposure compensation, and so on. In contrast, LightZone treats each adjustment you make as a separate entity -- somewhat like an adjustment layer in Adobe Photoshop lingo.

For example, to adjust the color balance, you click on the color balance tool, and it is stacked on top of your previous adjustments. Then you can adjust the color to your liking, and if you wish, add a second color balance action on top of it. Change your mind about the first one? Just click the X button and ditch it; the rest of the adjustments are retained.

Editing in LightZone. Click to enlarge

With this approach, you can mask off different portions of the image for each adjustment, or you may find it easier to think about the necessary color correction in two steps. In a lot of ways, that is a more natural approach to touching up photos: the actions that you take are the primitives, rather than the esoteric mathematical qualities of the conversion. It is easier to get the image you want by making separate adjustments to distinct problem areas than by trying to find one setting that corrects everything.

Get in the zone

LightZone takes its name from the zone system popularized by photographer and writer Ansel Adams. The original zone system is a set of methods for measuring the dynamic range in a real-world scene and reproducing it in print by adjusting exposure and development. The zones are the 10 steps from absolute black to absolute white that are discernible to the human eye. The methods involve consciously re-mapping the brightness of a scene (from shadows to highlights) so that all 10 zones are covered; this is what gives Adams' photos their wide tonal range without making them look artificially contrasty.

LightZone mimics the zone system with its ZoneMapper tool. A ZoneMapper is a flexible control that plots the luminance of an image against an Adams-style zone system chart.

As you mouse over the chart, LightZone highlights the matching-brightness portions of the image in its preview box. You can grab any point on the chart and slide it up or down to adjust the image's brightness, you can add multiple control points to make finer adjustments, and you can add but not move control points to keep certain brightness levels fixed. As with all tools in LightZone, you can add multiple ZoneMappers to your image in any order.

It is a very intuitive way to adjust a photo; the visual feedback is instantaneous and the control chart interface is far superior to incrementing and decrementing a text-box of decimal values.

The new release of LightZone adds another distinctive tool called ToneMapper, which is a generalization of the contrast mask technique available in many raster image editors. For the uninitiated, a contrast mask is a blurred, black/white-inverted copy of the image that is blended with the original. The blurred, inverted blend does an excellent job of increasing image sharpness and contrast on the small scale without affecting the overall image contrast.

ToneMapper is nowhere near as interesting as ZoneMapper, but it is a nice touch. In most other image editors you can only use a contrast mask if you create one manually with multiple image layers.

LightZone's last big selling point is that it is completely non-destructive. No operations ever alter the original RAW image file. You can export your corrected image to JPEG or TIFF format, but "saving" the file constitutes something different.

What LightZone saves is a .lzn file, by default using the same file name as the original before the .lzn suffix. The .lzn file is XML; it contains the name and location of the original RAW image and a copy of all of the operations you performed on it in LightZone.

In addition to the safety of this technique and small size of the file it generates, Kast believes that the human- and machine-readability of XML make the format useful for automating batch jobs. He described one such use case from his own experience, in which he faced the task of cropping and correcting a large number of photos destined for an eBay auction. But since they were all the same size, he only needed to fix one of them in LightZone. He then wrote a bash script that duplicated the .lzn file for every other file, changing the XML reference in each duplicate to point to one of the other originals -- a far, far faster solution that scripting the same behavior with macros in Photoshop.

Step three: profit!

I give high marks to LightZone across the board. Its interface is intuitive and superior in many respects to the cluttered slider-shelf of most RAW photo tools. Furthermore, it is considerably faster than many of the other options on Linux. The selection and editing tools are excellent. Since it uses dcraw (like most other RAW converters), it has fantastic camera support, and it integrates well with Linux color management and printing systems.

But isn't it just plain weird to offer a product like this for free on Linux, and for $250 on Windows and OS X? Kast concedes that it is an odd choice from a business perspective -- odd enough that he must maintain a FAQ list on the LightZone for Linux page reassuring visitors that the app is neither crippled, pirated, nor a hoax.

In spite of that confusion, he says that the company gets more from its Linux customers than it loses in hypothetical sales. Kast ensures that the Linux version works because it is his platform of choice. The rest of the company required "absolutely no persuasion" on his idea of releasing the it free of charge. The company felt that Linux licenses would be a fraction of Windows and Mac sales, and not worth the marketing expense.

But as a free download, LightZone attracts as many customers as Windows does at its current price point. And those Linux users are dedicated, assisting with bug reports, translations, and valuable feedback. "The Linux version gets us so much user connection and goodwill. A company can have a whole different kind of conversation with no-charge Linux users than it can have with supported Mac/Win users."

Kast and the other programmers develop for all three platforms concurrently. When there is platform-specific work, such as color management, they tackle the Windows version first, but whenever possible release all three simultaneously.

Linux users can participate in the official Light Crafts support forum to ask questions, but Kast also suggests that they subscribe to the LightZone mailing list, which is more technically oriented and makes for faster feedback from the developers.

LightZone 2.1 was released last month for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The Windows and OS X versions are available in a Basic edition for $150 and a Full version for $250. The Linux version is functionally equivalent to the Full version, and is free.

Links

1. "Light Crafts" - http://www.lightcrafts.com/
2. "LightZone" - http://www.lightcrafts.com/products/lightzone/
3. "a separate page" - http://sonic.net/~rat/lightcrafts/
4. "Bibble" - http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/04/25/1437224&tid=39
5. "Raw Therapee" - http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/11/16/1911249&tid=39
6. " " - http://www.linux.com/blob.pl?id=c92282deec31f5dd8ff3a54463f035a8
7. "zone system" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_system
8. "Ansel Adams" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansel_Adams
9. "contrast mask" - http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/contrast_masking.shtml
10. "dcraw" - http://cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
11. "FAQ list on the LightZone for Linux page" - http://sonic.net/~rat/lightcrafts/faq.html
12. "support forum" - http://www.lightcrafts.com/forums/index.php
13. "mailing list" - http://kast-dev.com/pipermail/lightzone/
14. "available" - http://www.lightcrafts.com/store/
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Is it hard to install Linux on your computer (PC)? I know you have to repartition or have a slave drive, but how is it done if you have one of these.
 
I have a support group that has covered this issue umpteem times.

Care2 Linux for Newbies

The answer is no it is not hard. The best thing to do is generally use an older system because Microsoft, to put it mildly, does not play well with others.

Generally speaking, you have to install Microsoft, then Install Linux. The issue is in the MBR boot sector. Linux intstall programs generally know how to recognize and leave the Microsoft partition alone, and then install the MBR (using GrUB) so that it can boot MS XP.

Chances are good that you will like Linux enough to stop using MS. Missing is a lot of MS stuff like office, but you get GIMP. This is the free Photoshop.

Also, nearly all web pages are served from Linux, so if you are building web pages you are far better off using Linux.

If you have broad band, you can set up a linux box using Dynamic DNS, and become your own ISP.

Ubuntu Linux is the brand that works best with Laptops.
 
Ok Daniel, maybe we can trade here.

If you tell me what you want to do, I will figure out how to do it.

I don't feel like paying for Photoshop (my bessamatic bill is SOARING), and I won't admit to stealing a copy here online... so I may stick with GIMP.

But what about the whole point of this thread. How useful is Lightzone ??

I am not sure I will get to it in the near future. I am busy w/ photography, and working on my empathy project: http://thinman.com/empathy
 
I'm going to try out Lightzone in my Ubuntu Linux partition.

I like the GIMP quite a bit and recently discovered a tip that helped align it with Photoshop, which I use in my Win partition.

There's a configuration file that comes with GIMP called ps-menurc. Find it and copy it to your home ~/.gimp-2.2 directory. Make a backup of your menurc file, then rename ps-menurc to menurc. Then using mainstream GIMP (not GIMPShop) keys such as Ctrl-L take you straight to Levels, Ctrl-M straight to Curves, Ctrl-U straight to Hue/Saturation.

On my system the ps-menurc file was found in /etc/gimp/2.0

This small change really speeded up my workflow.

Gene
 
Interesting, I'll certainly check it out.

One question: will it also allow to process 'raw' b&w filmscans? Or is it really only for 'raw' digital camera files?

And a comment on the GIMP: it' marvellous software, I even created a project to make duotone images in script-fu, but it has one major disadvantage for raw image processing: it doesn't support 16 bit! (at least not my version?).

Groeten,

Vic
 
Lightzone is a very interesting tool! A complete new approach.
But you really should have 1 GB of RAM (the more the better). It is quite demanding.
 
vicmortelmans said:
"And a comment on the GIMP: it' marvellous software," ... "but it has one major disadvantage for raw image processing: it doesn't support 16 bit!"

Vic
Click to expand...

You could always write the add-on,

john
 
john_van_v said:
I started in open systems in 1989. Now nearly two decades later, everything is still a hack. A little of this, a little of that.

If it seems frustrating to you, just think of how I feel. We developers and adminstrators thought we would get rid of that nonsense in a few years :bang:
Click to expand...

Oh, come on, all you have to do is edit your .rc files, mess around a little in /etc/init.d, check your .profile and .bashrc and whatever the equivalents are in /etc/sysconfig, make sure the linked libraries contain the right functions for the executable's system calls (gosh, did I forget to mark that executable as executable?), and maybe do a quick recompile of the app (or maybe the kernel would do it...) ;)

(Why doesn't my printer work?)
 
mjflory said:
Oh, come on, all you have to do is edit your .rc files, mess around a little in /etc/init.d, check your .profile and .bashrc and whatever the equivalents are in /etc/sysconfig, make sure the linked libraries contain the right functions for the executable's system calls (gosh, did I forget to mark that executable as executable?), and maybe do a quick recompile of the app (or maybe the kernel would do it...) ;)

(Why doesn't my printer work?)
Click to expand...

so true my sides hurt :)
 
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