My photography – distinctly of the amateur variety! – has taken a back seat of late (fractal obsession, dontcha know…) but has recently been revitalised as a result of finding a new (to me) editing program.
I’d been using Photoshop Elements v4 for some time and was perfectly happy with it but would need to upgrade it to v6 if I wanted to seriously dabble with taking pics in RAW format. So I downloaded the trial and was less than impressed by the ratio of added benefits to additional cost. I’m also not wild about the new GUI but, like with all s/w, I’d get used to it after a while.
Anyway, somewhere in my meanderings around the ‘net, I found mention of an editing program called LightZone so thought I’d give it a try – and so far, I am very impressed! It is aimed fairly and squarely at photographic post processing (RAW, JPG, TIFF) and doesn’t have the extra bells and whistles that PSE or PSP has, so for some things I’d still need another program, which is where my trusty old PSE v4 would come to the rescue! Sure, it’ll cost more than upgrading PSE but I’m inclined to think that the money would be well spent.
From my experiments so far, I’m particularly impressed by how easy it is to isolate areas within the image to make them the only areas adjusted (or vice versa) and by how good a job it does, and how easily, of bringing out details in things such as stonework where the images were taken in flat/dull light. You can select areas by shape, colour (and it’s not nearly as finicky to do either of those as it is in PSE) or by tonal value.
Here’s a section of a picture I took last year at Stonehenge as it came from the camera:
Here’s the same crop (more or less!) after I’d worked on that in LightZone:
[The original full image - shot as SHQ JPG on an Olympus E500 - can be seen here.]
Now, I’m not suggesting that the editing I did in LZ is perfect, far from it, but I was able to bring out details in the stones much better than I could do in PSE, and it was pretty easy to isolate the sky, to prevent it being completely washed out, and the grass, to stop that becoming over-saturated.
I certainly recommend that anyone considering a similar upgrade or a new purchase take a look at LightZone, which is available on a fully-featured 30 day trial.
(Just for clarity’s sake: I have no affiliation with this program)