A software review

[pecunium]

For those who care, I have a review of my preferred photo editor up at Terrence Karney Photography.

Mostly, I use LightZone, by Lightcrafts. I have Photoshop, and there are things I use it for (cleaning up spots, printing, and plug-ins, like Blow Up and NikEffects), but it's not my editor of choice.

Why? Because Photoshop is expensive, it's complex, it has a slew of features I don't need, it uses a lot of memory and processor time, and it hogs storage space (to avoid accidentally overwriting a file I don't want to overwrite I have to duplicate every file I open. When it's a 20mb-40mb .tif, that starts to eat a lot of storage, even without having to dupe everything.)

Comments

[flipping-hades.livejournal.com]

I've been using (and very happy with) Lightroom - I never heard of LightZone, and now I see that Lightroom seems to have taken large parts of its UI concept from LightZone. Interesting.

[rubin110.livejournal.com]

Lightroom is great if you haven't tried that yet.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

There's an extra w in your link to Lightcrafts. Just so you know. :)

I don't do much with photographs, but I occasionally need graphics for my website, or want to play with an image, or need to create a screenshot in association with my work as a technical writer. I mostly use Corel's Paint Shop Pro X when I need to edit graphics. I won't claim it's better than anything else (mostly because I haven't played with much else), but I can generally manage to do what I need to.

My stepson swears by Gimp, which is free. I tried an earlier version at his urging (he's swears it's much better now), but gave it up as just to cumbersome to deal with.

Glancing over the descriptions in your article and at the website, I'd say I might enjoy using LightZone for at least some of my work, especially when I want to adjust colors, as that's almost always the hardest task for me. Thanks for sharing. *g*

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I can't find that extra w... just so you know. I don't doubt something didn't work for you, but the link worked, and when I looked under the hood, the code was clea

Generally manage what you need to do is the benchmark I use for things. It's part of why I was resistant to trying Lightzone. PhotoShop was doing what I needed to do.

And then I discovered Lighzone did it, for me, in a better way, and with less hassle. If it had been about the same in the hassle dept., I'd have stuck with PS.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Head meet desk. I thought you were talking about the link in the review.

Mea culpa.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Sorry I wasn't clear about which link. I'm glad you were able to figure it out. :)