Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

Chapter 7 ■ RAW Converters 75
surrounding area with automatic “feathering.” LightZone makes the zone system easier
to understand with an interactive grayscale image analyzer called ZoneFinder. It segments
a small version of the image into 16 grayscale zones, each differing by half an
f-stop (50% brightness) from the next.
A companion tool, ZoneMapper, shows the zones in a graduated scale, over which you
can position the mouse to see the corresponding zone highlighted in ZoneFinder. Using
the two tools together you can find the white and black points, fix the exposure and
obtain good, deep blacks, using luminosity-based adjustments. For example, when you
expand a zone by moving the mouse in ZoneMapper, you get brighter values and
increased contrast in the identified region. “This ability,” says the vendor with some justification,
“has been the missing element in truly moving the zone system into the realm
of digital imaging.”
You can also make color adjustments in LightZone using RGB values. Other tools
include sharpen, blur, noise reduction, clone, crop, spot, and rotate. LightZone comes
with an illustrated, 82-page book in PDF format that explains everything about its philosophy
and operation in detail.
Figure 7.2
LightZone implements Ansel Adams’s theories and provides a complete zonal editing capability.