I went to a local photo club talk on various Raw "Negative"
Processors/Editors/work flow/organizers etc.
(Aperture,LightRoom,Bibble,Rawshooter,Lightzone etc)
The most interesting demonstration was from a little local company (near my
house). , LightCrafts ("LightZone"). It made quite a stir at MacWorld despite
Apple and Adobe introductions of their new products at same time.
For people who are old darkroom rats, the way this product appears to work,
is really attractive. It claims the basic idea is based on traditional B&W
zone sytem, but it is the way you can do things without complex masks, which
looks so quick and appealing. It is much more like iterative dodging and
burning where you can go back and tweak the dodging mask,it's feathering,change
aparent light angle etc etc.
http://www.lightcrafts.com/company/index.php
A lot of their tools work with Luminance as a basic tool for identifying how
to do many things. This keeps color balance issues more in the background as
you tweak things. The teststrip view of luminance rather than a
curves/histogram view emphasises this world view. Clearly, they are actually
going to put the curves/histo into the product as well, since most Digi
photographers are now used to using these and will miss them if totally
unavailable. The zone view fits rather nicely with people who have used a
darkroom spot enlarger photometer, with calibrated teststrips or have used an
OM4 with multispot.
Only the Mac OSX ver is currently shipping ($249) and there is also a Mac (30
day) trial version. They offered to send me an early trial version of the pc
version when available in next few weeks, so I will probably try it out.
I would be interested to hear other peoples comments on this product, if they
try it, or have tried it.
There is also supposed to be a completely free (but unsupported) Linux
version, but I could not see it on the website.
What is interesting is just how much can be done with what is a
relatively small range of current tools, and this really is much more
photographer oriented (unlike PS , which has such a massive learning curve and
is techie oriented).
There seemed to be a number of rather important things they are still working
on so the "unlimited lifetime upgrade" offered, is likely rather important.
The image is always rendered by the program, so "edited files" remain
trivially small (unlike bloated PS layers that balloon into gigabyte files,for
say large format film scans) since these are just lists of XML commands, to the
rendering engine. This also means unlimited stepback,forward,edit/delete steps
etc. It also means future things like collaborative editing over the net etc
are potentially easily possible without bandwidth issues. The original
"negative" file is never actually edited and it is only when an output file
format is chosen that a true new file would ever be generated,maybe to send to
your local print shop,publisher etc. As with many of these "digital negative"
raw manipulation tools you never lose any information in your editing, unlike
traditional editors especially those that work in say only an 8bit data space.
LightCrafts appears to be collaborating with Apple to provide some
limited level of integration with Apple's Aperture and maybe eventually with
Adobe too. (Lightzone is also now distributed in Apple Stores). They are
promoting the product as complimentary to many of these other products and
point out that people often spend more on PS plugins than on this whole
product. The time saving and "focus on the picture" rather than the tool is the
sales pitch to even hardened PS users. It is the sort of thing that might
ultimately be aquired by one of those companies and integrated as plugin maybe?
Tim Hughes
Joel Wilcox <jfwilcox@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2/9/06, Bob Whitmire wrote:
>
> Okay, I took the plunge, recognizing that sooner or later, progress being
> what it is, Photoshop would worm its way into my life. Did the deed, got
> CS2, and even managed to install it. As a benefit, I get a choice of some
> "free" goodies. Once choice is between a couple of free issues of either
> Photoshop User or Layers magazines. Anyone read these? Any recommendations?
> My principal use for CS2, natch, will be processing photos and scans for
> printing and sale, not for publications, etc., so print-shop uses and
> how-to's are not high on my list of things I want to keep up with.
>
> And as an aside, I found it fascinating that as I registered my copy of CS2,
> in the drop-box where they want to know your profession, "Photographer" is
> not among the choices. There are all sorts of graphics and design choices,
> but not nary a one for Photographer. I identified myself as "Other," which,
> I suspect, is the story of my life.
>
> And, FWIW, the user manual that came with the software, while nicely printed
> and easy to move around in, nevertheless practically assumes users are
> graphics and print-shop professional types rather than starving artists or
> others trying to assemble properly pretentious "artist statements." Maybe
> that explains why the damned software costs so much. (No, I didn't pay
> retail. I did the old-version + new upgrade thing which allowed me to
> register and activate with Adobe and receive future upgrades and updates,
> etc. But it was _still_ expensive.)
>
> --Bob
Bob,
I suspect we really only need the current Elements for most of our
work. I've been with PS since version 4, so I'm just too scared to
fall off the wagon. I end up just always lagging a version behind it
seems. But I hope you enjoy it and more than that, I hope it adds to
your enjoyment of your photography.
Joel W.
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