LightZone 2 released

[Herman Teeuwen]

http://www.lightcrafts.com/

[Andrew Rodney]

Can't find anything about upgrading from 1.0 but I recall originally the company said all upgrades to existing customers would be free. Any ideas?

[Herman Teeuwen]

Originally Posted by Andrew Rodney

I recall originally the company said all upgrades to existing customers would be free.

That's what I recall too.

Herman

[Andrew Rodney]

Well version 2.0 took my 1.0 serial number just fine so I guess the free upgrades do apply.

[Richard McKeethen]

Hello,

My name is Richard McKeethen and I handle email support for Light Crafts, makers of LightZone.

To upgrade to LightZone 2.0, go to the LightZone trial version download page and click the link for to download for your platform, Mac or PC:

http://www.lightcrafts.com/products/lightzone/download/

If you're a registered owner of any previous version of LightZone Classic, simply download and install the trial version. The software will automatically locate your LightZone serial number / software license activation key from any previous install.

If you have any questions, please email us directly at support@lightcrafts.com

Cheers,

Richard McKeethen
Light Crafts, Inc.
http://www.lightcrafts.com

[Dierk Haasis]

Install over it I like to do ...

When I choose the existing Lightzone directory on my machine, the installer for v2 tells me I have to choose another one.

[Mary Bull]

Confirmed.

Same experience here.

Mary

[Dierk Haasis]

I found a way: Simply uninstall v1 then install v2 into the former's directory. The licence is saved in a text file which gets not deleted upon uninstall.

[Mary Bull]

Very good to know.

Thanks a mil for the tip.

Mary

[Erik DeBill]

I didn't even bother with the uninstall :)

I wish the rest of the switch was as pleasant. So far (I've now used 2.0.0, 2.0.1 and 2.0.2) I've run into the following unpleasantnesses:

1. I had been using a Channel Mixer followed by a Color Balance to first convert to black and white and then tone the resulting image. The new Color Balance tool will not let me type in RGB values, and the little color wheel is not precise enough to use reliably (it's fine if you're just feeling for things, but if you want to have a reproduceable effect it won't do it).
2. The "Raw Tone Curve" applied to RAW files by default is much more punchy than I'd like - I really prefer to start with a very flat image and control everything myself. I find myself removing it on most images. For some reason I didn't notice this on the old version. There is no way to set a preference for removing it, and applying a template is additive so it won't remove things that are already present. Plus, I have to wait for it to be applied after opening a RAW file before I can remove it. That just adds insult to injury.
3. It defaults to having you in some sort of region drawing mode, so any random click (e.g. while switching focus) will start drawing a region. I find myself using the Esc key a lot to back out of these things.
4. In the browser, the "rename" option always errors out. I was sooo looking forward to this, but it doesn't like me. Perhaps because all my files are mounted via NFS (I can't imagine them shipping something that never worked - too much thought has gone into this product).
5. Doing File -> Save As and setting it to TIFF forces me to reset my color profile each time intstead of remembering that I always want to use Adobe RGB.
6. Where saving/exporting as TIFF would sometimes be painfully slow, it's now consistently painful. This really screws with my workflow, since I process as much as I can in Lightzone, then switch to Photoshop to print, resize, add copyright notices and save as JPG for web posting.
   

On the bright side, I'm finding a lot of stuff to love:

1. Templates are NICE. I wish I could select a subset of the tools in use to save as the template, but it's not too hard to go remove all the ones you don't want to save. Being able to save a good b&w conversion + toning as a template and then reapply helps a lot with the sting of losing the old color balance tool, and I'm looking forward to using this when I want to process a btch of images in an identical manner.
2. The printing dialogue is now useable! Previously I couldn't print a 7x10.5 centered on 8.5x11 because changing to the "minimize margins" paper definition didn't change print area. Ooops. I spoke too soon :( The dialogue was fine, but the print came out off-center the same old way it did before. I then tried a print in landscape mode and it very definitely showed the same behaviour it did before (not changing margins to match the paper selected).
3. The new browser is nice. I wish I could make the thumbs bigger so I could compare images better, but as it is I can switch back and forth pretty easily, and the large preview window is excellent.
4. It's still much much nicer than Photoshop for getting tone levels right. Zonemapper is much much better than a curves tool for that. The ZoneFinder seems to be a touch more consistent in this new version, as well. Now, if we could tell it to only apply to red, green or blue channels, I could use it to do really sophisticated b&w toning....

[StuartRae]

I downloaded the trial version of LightZone , but discarded it almost immediately when I saw the dreadful lack of detail in the raw conversions.

Below are two 100% crops of a photo of St Catherine's Church in Eskdale. Outside the door, a memorial stone was waiting to be laid. Have a look at the writing.

Both conversions are with basic default settings, and the sharpening in RSP is completely turned off.

LightZone



RSP




Here's a down-sized image of the whole thing.





Regards,

Stuart

=================
Edited to add the full image

[Andrew Rodney]

To be fair, you might want to apply some sharpening to the Lightzone image and try to match it to the other converter. Some converters say sharpening is off when that's not really the case. They add sharpening even when set to off so folks don't, as you did, dismiss the rendering right out of the can. Its possible that if you turn up sharpening in LZ, it will look awful so I'm not suggesting your call here isn't valid. But you can't always trust any default rendering in any converter. You have to try to make them look as close as possible then examine issues (like the sharpening now introduces undue noise; that's not good).

[Dierk Haasis]

To add to Andrew's post: RS[x] always applies sharpening. The details can be found in their [hopefully still available] forum by searching. Or Michael Tapes may jump in if asked for.

[StuartRae]

Some converters say sharpening is off when that's not really the case.

RS[x] always applies sharpening.

Dierk and Andrew,

I'm quite familiar with all the discussions about sharpening on the RS forum, having contributed to them myself in the past.

RS does NOT perform sharpening of the output image if the "Apply Sharpening" box in the Batch Convert tab is unchecked. I wonder if MT could confirm this?

On the other hand it is very aggressive in detail extraction, which can sometimes lead to unpleasant artifacts.

Detail and sharpness are easily confused.

Regards,

Stuart

[Dierk Haasis]

Originally Posted by StuartRae

RS does NOT perform sharpening of the output image if the "Apply Sharpening" box in the Batch Convert tab is unchecked.

Yes it does.

[Edit:]
Unfortunately I am unable to locate the associated threads and messages over at the Pixmantec forum; the date range for searches is only 2 months, the direct link in the FAQ is blind.
[/Edit]

[StuartRae]

Dierk,

It would be nice to get this cleared up. I don't mind at all being wrong, but for the moment I'm sticking to what I said.

I managed to go back 8 months on the RS forum, and came up with the following exchange:

I did some tests on this a while ago. You can determine when there is no sharpening by shooting a black-white edge and then developing the RAW file any way you like. There are image processing programs that will let you look at the edge and see if it has magically developed extra acutance -- which would mean that some sharpening is applied.

I've found where the sharpening turns of in C1 you needed to set sharpening off by checking a control, and also set the sharpening strength to 0. In RSP, you have to uncheck a control to turn sharpening off, and also set detail enhancement to -50. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to set sharpening to its minimum setting as well. I did not see any evidence that this led to blurring, only that no sharpening could be seen. RSP at its defaults sharpens fairly strongly.

Scott Kirkpatrick


There is no such thing as 0, unless this is referring to a post conversion sharpening. All converters blur to some extent to remove sensor pattern artifacts. if you set detail extraction to -50 then you are adding more blur, and at +50 you are not blurring at all. So this is not sharpening, yet it will lead to a sharper image. My suggestion for your stock usage is to check the "no sharpening" box (no need to set sharpening to -50), and leave the detail extraction at 0. That is the equivalent of no sharpening in RSP.

Michael Tapes

I take Michael's reply to mean that
a. detail and sharpness are not the same thing and
b. that it is possible to turn off sharpening in RS.

Regards,

Stuart

==================
Edit: The conversation was dated March 21st 2006 and was part of a thread titled "Basic sharpening question - please clarify".

[StuartRae]

I don't know if this proves anything either way, but what it does show is that turning the sharpening OFF in the Batch convert tab does have some effect. It also shows that the effect is the same as moving the sharpening slider to -50, which we were always led to believe also turned off sharpening.



Regards,

Stuart

[Dierk Haasis]

Whatever, Pixmantec were never too clear about what really happens. At times they said sharpening - to counter softness caused by the filter in front of the sensora - will always be applied. Then there is Michael's statement above, which corroborates you and your findings.

Lightzone, which uses dcraw IISTC, does need a manual sharpening setting as your original example shows. To me the differences of RAW converters left at their [or the camera's] defaults are irrelevant - always have been.

Another point is that most pictures nowadays get [way] oversharpened. From your test strip I'd chose the one with no sharpening.

[Herman Teeuwen]

LightZone does a very bare raw conversion and doesn't apply any sharpening or denoising in its default rendition. Most other software apply some liberal amount of noise reduction and sharpening by default instead.

RSP's implementation of sharpening/denoising is not as straightforward as it is with other RC's. And then there's the issue of RSP's detail extraction and its effect on detail (local contrast enhancement) and noise. The detail extraction slider sets RSP's bias for fine detail or noise. The finer detail you want the more also fine noise will be undetected and vice versa.

Therefore, to compare apples to apples, I agree with Andrew that you should try to match the level of sharpness.

> Lightzone, which uses dcraw

I don't believe it uses dcraw anymore.

[Asher Kelman]

Herman,

You active participation is very welcome.

You are encouraged to post examples that illustrate existing properties and that solve issues raised here.

You may add references to download files including Demos! We want to encourage the use of all the convertors including LR, Aperture, (Silky Pix needs to answer :) ) Bibble and other programs!

We are looking for healthy debate and increase publicity of beneficial nuances of each RAW convertor.

LZ is indeed fascinating!

Asher

[Dierk Haasis]

Originally Posted by Herman Teeuwen

> Lightzone, which uses dcraw

I don't believe it uses dcraw anymore.

Interesting, while I haven't seen a hint of dcraw with v1, I have it in LZ's folder after upgrading.

[Herman Teeuwen]

> Interesting, while I haven't seen a hint of dcraw with v1, I have it in LZ's folder after upgrading.

Quote from Fabio Riccardi on DOP forum:

"LightZone 1.5 and up sports a new proprietary RAW converter technology which is way faster and much more accurate that what we had before (which was based on the excellent dcraw converter)."

[Brian Lowe]

Here is a sharpening technique I learned from Jacek Gozdz for Lightzone 2, I think it works very well.



1. set unsharp mask into difference blend mode, and play with the sliders until there is as much sharpening as possible without "halo" around the edges, and big noise in the doors and sky.

use these settings : amount 500; radius 1,2; threshold 19

2. Now just change the blend mode into soft light, and voila

TUNING:

the smaller threshold the bigger noise, so if you have some noise you need to increase it (or change the method)

If you set blend mode into hard light you get extreme local contrast

some pictures get oversaturated - change opacity

some pictures get too dark - put zone mapper in screen mode before the unsharp mask




Give it a try and see what you think.


-Brian-

[Fabio Riccardi]

Hello there,

I just became aware of this fascinating discussion about LZ, it is great to see what people think about our product and what their real needs are. LightZone is a very young product that tries to innovate digital photography, it is definitively not perfect and we're working very hard to improve it, mostly by listening what you guys have to say...

I thought I'd contribute to the discussion about our raw converter "hows" and give you guys my own "perspective" about it.

Our current RAW converter technology is developed in house by Light Crafts, it uses a very advanced demosaicing algorithm which is very fast and extracts lots of detail from the image. It works differently from most other demosaicing algorithms and it is based on techniques traditionally used to interpolate high resolution electromagnetic field measurements (pieces from another life of mine, I have a background in Electrical Engineering, Signal Processing, High Energy Physics and Computer Science).

Some people on some other forums find it very capable of subtle detail recovery:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/re...ssage=20792738

As some of you remarked already prior to LightZone 1.5 we used the excellent dcraw to perform the demosaicing, which unfortunately turns out to be quite slow. Thereby I developed my own algorithm.

For the curious: we still use dcraw to decode the RAW image format and extract the RAW data from it, it does an excellent job and saves us a lot of development effort.

As some of you already remarked, our approach to RAW conversion is to do the minimum post-processing as possible by default: no sharpening, noise reduction or else in the conversion. We prefer to start with a "really raw" image and then use our regular tools to post process it.

Usually we only apply a default tone curve to the image (a ZoneMapper layer) to make it look like what most people would expect "out of the box", pleasing tones and colors and fairly open shadows.

Some cameras produce fairly noisy images or contain quite a bit if Moire because of weak or no anti-aliasing (e.g. the older Canon 1Ds, the new Leica M8), so by default we add a NR layer to deal with that.

If you don't like the default tone curve or want to modify the default conversion in any way (add default sharpening), you can alter the defaults and save them again as a default template for the camera in question.

In comparison to other RAW converters, I feel quite proud of Light Zone. Comparing it to ACR (turn off all the Auto stuff and set NR and Sharpening to zero) I find that our images have comparable or less conversion arifacts (a fact of life in image debayering) and are quite a bit sharper and reacher in detail. In most cases you don't really need additional sharpening, or very little of it.

Other RAW converters sometimes produce less artifacts (I am paricularly impressed with Capture One) but at the expense of significatively longer conversion times.

RAW conversion is still something like a black art, everybody has its own philosophy about it and jealously keeps its secrets. The bottom line to me is that modern digital cameras have oodles of pixels and trying to chase the last bit of artifacts in the image made more sense when you had to squeeze the most out of a 3M pixel camera, with 10M or more for entry-level cameras as we have now it becomes a bit pointless...

Images coming out of the latest Canon and Nikon cameras are impressively clean of artifacts and have tons of detail, IMHO this is mostly due to the fine tuning of Noise Reduction, IR and AA filters and microlenses technology. Oddly enough Medium Format backs seem to have lower image quality than average DSLRs these days.

Finally, all the template management and workflow stuff in LZ is still at its infancy, expect big improvements in the next few months. :)

Thank you guys very much again for your interest and insight, best regards,

- Fabio (the man behind LightZone)

[Asher Kelman]

Fabio,

It's so wonderful to have you here with us! As you can see we have dedicated LZ users already and this will grow. I tried a demo way back and the idea of approaching and doing homage to zone paradigms of Ansel Adams is worthy in itself. It is also intuitive.

Having "the man" behind software we use is a great boost for us.

Asher

[Asher Kelman]

BTW, Fabio, have you tackled the M8 yet?

I have made available an M8/5D set of DNG + RAW files that really challenges!

It's here

http://www.openphotographyforums.com...ead.php?t=1582

This might be a diversion for you, but I just thought I'd mention it just for interest sake!

Asher

[Fabio Riccardi]

I don't mean to dimish your hopes, but it doesn't look promising to me. For the little I know of color theory there is no profile that can fix the problem. The profiles available for C1 are actually pretty horrible, if you verify the equivalent color gamut obtained with them you can see that it is smaller than sRGB. I think Leica needs to fix the camera...

- Fabio

[Asher Kelman]

Hi Fabio,

I realize that what is done is done as far as the wrong spectral data coming into the camera. With such an image, one can only make compromises. Still, there are a whole lot of professional photographers who have been using Jamie Robert's profiles and feel that this has normalized the images for them.

One Photographer has had a good success with the M8 as is for landscape. Here, of course a little more green might not be noticed. This photographer, BTW, has no IR-UV blocking filter for his lens!

However, Landscape, (not having synthetic blacks), is not Sax Fifth Avenue or Vogue or the beach!

However, for real city world, a file from the M8 without an IR-UV blocking filter can get severely damaged with infrared reaching the CCD sensor. For these, new profiles seem to rescue the images.

So right now, without the solution provided by Leica with their own specified IR-UV cut of filters, the following are my current working postulates

1. M8 is exceptional for B&W photography as in weddings or street photography.

2. The camera can deliver exceptional landscape and nature images.

3. Pictures with synthetics can be marred by reflected IR light.

4. Black synthetics can reflect IR and severely degrade image color.

5. With use of blocking IR-UV filters the problems above can be largely eliminated.

6. Custom profiles should be able to virtually remove the remaining false color.

For sure, LightZone would seem to be an ideal framework in which to optimize the DNG files for B&W photography with the M8. Any corrective work can only help.

My enthusiasm for the M8 is not, I think, ungrounded. The camera is a tool that needs to be used for limited purposes or with a blocking filter for the next several weeks at least. After that, it's up to Lecia and Leicophiles to make it work! I think they will!


Asher


I have taken the liberty of including Fabio's important response and to also move it to a new thread on it's own which it merits.



Hi Asher,

the M8 is a fantastic camera, I didn't mean to diminish it in any way, and most of the times it can produce just superb images. Fortunately aside from some black syntetic matherials, there are very few objects in nature that have a high reflectivity in the IR spectrum, so the concerns are pretty minimal, unless you're really in goth fashion photography...

I actually totally understand the concerns of Leica engineers and where their "problem" comes from.

With very sharp lenses as the Leicas the interface with the sensor is critical, if you have ever studied in detail images from the older Canon 1Ds (I have looked very closely to lots of pixels while developing my own RAW converter) you will notice lots of chromatic aberration with wide angle lenses, the sharper the lens the higher the CA. These aberrations totally disappeared on the later Canon cameras (1Ds mkII, 5D).

IMHO this is due to a too thick IR filter on the older sensors, which would diffract light at various angles depending on the wavelenght, especially for wide angle lenses.

Engineering is the art of compromise, you want to use sharp lenses on digital cameras that were not designed for the purpose? Well, they have to come with something that works, at least most of the time. If I would have worked in the Leica engineering department I would probably have made the same choice.

I think that the real "problem" with the M8 is people expect a lot from it and they're looking way too close to its (very sharp) pixels. Maybe no other cameras has been scrutinized so closely before. If you look at the weird stuff that the Canon Or Nikon (or everybody else's) engineering departments have produced in the last few years, you'd be surprised that it works at all. Still people take lots of great pictures using that stuff.

It is a new product (just like LightZone :) but it is really promising. The M8 is a camera that you can "feel" in your hands, where the attention doesn't go to the bleep of the autofocus but instead your eyes have to *see* what you're doing. Many photographers underestimate the power of their eyes and get trapped in a maze of meaningless technical information, histograms and what not.

The Leica M8 can help photographers to reestablish confidence in their own eyes and start taking pictures again.

Now please, if they could produce a full 16 bits DNG file instead of a silly 8 bits gamma encoded one. ;)

Cheers,

- Fabio

[Asher Kelman]

Now back to Lightzone. Of course we need good clean files to start with.

Still, there are plenty of situations where the M8 produces great files.

Has anyone, as yet, tried working with M8 RAW files with Lightzone to see how it does with Landscape of B&W files (as well as the the Black Materials and available adjustment profiles for purple, even with Fabio's caveats)?

Asher

[Fabio Riccardi]

Asher,

you might be happy to hear that this month's LightZone contest on Digital Outback Photo will feature an M8 image taken by Uwe and an example LZN adjustment from me :)

Just download a trial version of LZ and give it a try!

Cheers,

- Fabio