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LightZone

The $100 Java-based LightZone costs about the same as Bibble Lite but, at a first glance, offers only a fraction of the functionality. It has no built-in database, minimal metadata functionality and even less flexible print functionality than Bibble's already poor showing. In spite of all this, its excellent colour correction tools make LightZone one of the most interesting Linux photo tools currently available.

One of the standout tools is the ZoneMapper – a tonal value editor divided into 16 greyscale zones. If you roll your mouse over the zone scale, the tool colours the areas that match each zone in a thumbnail preview of the image. This a very quick way to analyse which areas of an image require correction and assess where you need to stretch or compress the tone curve. The process is similar to making adjustments using Photoshop Curves, but is a lot more intuitive.


Zoom The LightZone image editing tools are among the best that are currently available

All LightZone tools are non-destructive. When you close the image editor, the program automatically creates a JPEG file that contains the edited image and a list of the editing steps that were made. You can set the size of this file in the program preferences, and the default saves images to fit within a 1024x1024 pixel frame. You can use the Program's Convert tool to save full-resolution image files with 8-bit or 16-bit colour depth. The target colour space and rendering intent are also set in the Convert dialog.

In addition to the ZoneMapper, LightZone's standard toolset also includes noise reduction, white balance adjustment, black-and-white conversion and the unique Relight exposure optimiser. Relight is simple to use and allows even beginners to quickly make separate adjustments to the shadow and highlight areas of an image. All editing tools can be combined and you can use masks to apply them selectively, either on specific areas or specific colour regions. You can save successful combinations of editing steps as "Styles", and there is a wide selection of preset styles for you to try out.

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