Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
Comments
With its attractive interface, LightZone is a pleasure to use and deserves to secure a share
of the highly competitive image editing market. Its implementation of the zone system
is logical and genuinely useful to photographers. Launched in 2005, it won MacWorld
“Best of Show” the following year and the “Editors’ Choice” award at the end of 2007.
Ongoing development, excellent documentation, and favorable reviews have established
it as a serious contender.
Above all, LightZone succeeds in partially automating the task of processing digital
images without sacrificing quality control. For example, the built-in “instant styles” feature
lets you select styles from categories such as high dynamic range, local contrast, and
toning—and then tweak them to your taste. It is an innovative and effective approach
that appeals to the unashamed control freak in every true photographer.
Version: LightZone 3.5 (2008)
OS: Windows 2000 with SP4, XP with SP2 (32-bit or x64), and Vista; Mac OS X 10.4.3 or
later; Linux
RAM: 1GB (2GB recommended)
Supported file formats: Major RAW formats; JPEG, TIFF, and linear DNG
Price level: Approx. $250, Basic edition without multi-image editing and batch
processing $150
Address: Light Crafts, Inc., 200 Sheridan Avenue, Suite 307, Palo Alto, CA 94306-2037, United
States
www.lightcrafts.com
Raw Therapee
Developer: Gábor Horváth
Purpose: Free RAW converter and digital photo processor
Description
Based on Dave Coffin’s freely available dcraw conversions of RAW code, Raw Therapee
is a free RAW converter and digital photo processing software package.
Raw Therapee, which stands for “THe Experimental RAw Photo Editor,” should not
be underestimated. It has a very wide range of features, including contrast and white
balance adjustment, custom curve support, temperature/green tint correction, independent
shadow and highlight controls, luminance modification in CIELab color space,
unsharp mask sharpening, color denoising, image flipping and rotation, cropping, and
simple lens distortion correction. Most importantly, it produces superb quality RAW
conversions.