#TUTORIAL LIGHTZONE HOW TO#
#TUTORIAL LIGHTZONE WINDOWS#

As your mouse moves across the zones different areas light up in the Zone window. The mouse is positioned at the 8th zone down and all areas of the image corresponding to this zone are shown in yellow in the upper Zone Finder window. The wider band of zones represent those in the actual image. On its left are 16 exposure levels, from pure white to pure black. Notice how the darker sections have been lightened but the highlights have not been blown out.Īdd a Zone Mapper. Relight is interesting because, as far as I can tell, it actually analyzes each individual image and adjust accordingly, in other words it's not just a generic tool but takes each image's exposure into account. Relight has the capability of rescuing badly underexposed areas of your image while still keeping the highlights under control, all with a single click. To be honest, I rarely use the RAW adjustment and usually just dive straight into adjusting things with the other tools, but I thought it would be nice to show this capability.Ī Relight tool will further lighten the darker parts of the image and tame the highlights. I lighten the under exposed image a bit by using the RAW Exposure slider, leaving Temperature and Tint unadjusted. (if you click on each of the images below you'll get a bigger version to allow you t follow more clearly.) NEF file and LightZone immediately puts a RAW file adjuster at the start of the tool stack. Here is a step-by-step example of editing a Nikon RAW image (.NEF) The other premier tool is the Relight tool, one click and your photo's exposure is automatically adjusted, taming highlights and improving shadow detail. As you move your mouse over the image you'll see different parts of the Zone Finder window light up yellow. If your mouse is on an area matching a particular Zone in the tool then all areas of the image corresponding to that zone will be shown in the Zone Finder window. Adjusting exposure is simply a matter of clicking on the level you want to change and moving it up (lighter) or down (darker.) Pulling two zones apart increases contrast while pushing them together decreases it. LightZone uses 16 levels of exposure, from pure black to pure white, and each area of your image will fall into one of these zones. It is based on the Zone System developed by Ansel Adams, master of Black and White landscape photography. The Zone Mapper, which I find far more intuitive than Photoshop's curves, is at the heart of LightZone and makes editing tasks, such as adjusting contrast or exposure, extremely easy. I rarely use a Histogram anymore, preferring the Zone Mapper and associated Zone Finder window. above the tool bar is set of tabs for the Zone Finder, Color Mask, Histogram and Sample windows.Crop, Rotate and Region tools are on the main tool bar above the image. above the tool stack is a bar containing the editing tools including the Zone Mapper, the Relight tool, Sharpen, Gaussian Blur, Hue/Saturation, Colour Balance, White Balance, Black&White, Noise Reduction, Clone Stamp, Spot Removal and Red Eye Reduction.Changing the order of the tools (drag & drop) changes the outcome. LightZone applies the tools bottom-up, so it would first apply the Zone Mapper and on the result it would apply the Hue/Saturation. Here we have applied two tools, a Zone Mapper and a Hue/Saturation tool. pre-created styles to apply to your image, a fast way of doing edits and fixes.Let's kick off with a quick tour, take a look at the screenshot below: I use an iMac at home and an Ubuntu Linux laptop for work with LightZone on both.

#TUTORIAL LIGHTZONE WINDOWS#

You can edit from RAW, JPEG, DNG or TIF files and it runs on Mac, Windows and even Linux. So you end up with two files, the original image and a generated file which is your edited image. When you save, LightZone creates a new file with all edits embedded, leaving your original untouched. LightZone does true non-destructive editing, the image is not altered and all edits are transformations applied to the original, resulting in a new image. But I think it's quite intuitive and have muddled my way through it for a while now, so I just thought I'd show you what I've learned.

#TUTORIAL LIGHTZONE HOW TO#

While I evangelize LightZone amongst friends and family, the most common question I get is how to get started, lack of documentation and 'How-Tos' is a big weakness. This will be a two part blog aimed at giving you an overview of how LightZone works, although I'm not an expert on it, mind you. I'm a photographer, not a graphic designer, and so I want a cost effective tool focussed on what I do, without a lot of extra bells and whistles that I'll never use.

Photoshop is, doubtless, the most widely used photo editing software, but it's a tool that seems primarily designed for graphic designers. This is an edited version of the article I mentioned in this post.

Tutorial lightzone