LightZone (from LightCrafts)

Dear visitor and LightZone user,

I wish I could give some good news, but unfortunately the development of LighZone had been discontinued without notice to the existing customers and users.

However, Tex and Doug are trying to set up a site with more information on how to activate the license, installation issues and all nine yards. Please cooperate and spread the good news about the new server and read on. If you want to receive updates and news, you can send me your e-mail address which I will collect and forward to Tex (Rest assured, I won’t use your e-mail address for any other purpose – I’ve got other things to do).

Here is what Tex just sent me today (2011-11-08):

Hello to all of you, around the world.

First off, let me immediately state 3 things:  We will not be spamming you with a bunch of emails (see below).  And, If you do not want to be on this list, just let me know and I will remove you right away.

This list has been created mainly from direct emails I have received from you recently or in the past year or so.  A few of you are on this list because I mined your names from DPR, either because you had messaged me there or had responded to recent threads about the demise of LZ.  A smaller few of you were mined from DPR post from the last 12 months because you mentioned you had used/are using LZ in your workflow.  That is how I got this current group.  As you all should know by now, Lightcrafts the company is dead.  LightZone and Aurora, its products, are now ….in limbo of some kind. Orphans?  Properties being shopped around?  We don’t know for sure.

So, here is our news, which I think is great.  In a nutshell, Doug Pardee has been doing really sterling work on finding out how we can keep LZ alive, both in terms of activations issues, downloading possibilities, now possibly lost license # recovery, and–fanfare, please—the creation of new raw files (4 so far!).  Any of us who care owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude.  I copy pertinent bits of his emails to me below.  We are not attempting a full hack at this time, and we are trying to be careful not to get illegal or tread into murky ethical waters with copyright and IPR issues.  Our aim is survival of our beloved software and support of the user community, which should be mutual, I might add.  But we’ve got links to the install-file downloads, including the Mac 3.9.2 install for Java SE6 and Lion (OS X 10.7), and that we’ve got (mostly untested at this point) updates to allow LightZone to work with Raw files from newer camera models.

See what Doug’s been doing here (and get your download links, etc):  

https://github.com/Doug-Pardee/LightZombie

He and I have also been discussing starting up a new website for the purpose of LZ support.  I have purchased the following domain name (Doug’s witty suggestion):  www.lightzombie.org – plus several others so there is a little protection.  It is on this site that we will create, well, whatever we have to, and we are certainly open to suggestions.  We’ll start on that later this week, and by that I mean I’ll start investigating what it is we’ll need for a forum and blog, and whether that’s going to be a WordPress thing or etc. 

Hosting has not been determined, but one of you has made a kind offer of free hosting which we will be happy to accept if it works out at your end (separate email coming just to you on that one).  We are also now on twitter (oh, gawd…..): @LightZombie , and we’ll see if Facebook is necessary.  Once we get this stuff up and properly running, then we won’t need to email you directly, you’ll just go to the website or Github or the tweets, or etc. yourselves.

So, think of Doug as our CTW (Chief Technical Wizard—not sure what order wizard he is, because I’m technically retarded)  and me as CCH (Chief Comms Hobbit).  And we are not the zombies, btw, the software is.

Any and all technical and/or other assistance is most welcome!  Tech stuff goes to Doug, website and forum  stuff to me for the most part.  Send questions about your problems to me for now, so as not to bog down Doug who is working on fascinating stuff.  I’ll be acting as ticketmaster.

Best wishes from us to you!

tex andrews

Now, for the real interesting part, excerpts from Doug’s emails to me:

Here’s where I am on the technical side:

• The github site is all set up.
• The github site has Wayback Machine links to all of the original install packages.
• I have the dcraw.c source code updated with the three differences that I found.
• I’ve set up github so that whenever Dave Coffin releases a new version of dcraw.c, we have a computerized merge process that will produce the LightZone variant without any brain-work needed.
• I have initial builds of the updated dcraw for Windows, Mac, and Linux! I hope they all work.
• I’ve created custom Raw Tone Curve templates for four cameras, based on interest expressed by DPReview members: — Canon EOS 60D for Frischnetz — Olympus E-5 for Skaarungen — Pentax K-r for jok1000 — Panasonic LX5 for solsang LZ logs over 200 error messages about EXIF metadata every time it looks at an E-5 Raw file, but if you don’t look at the log file everything seems to work fine. I’ve opened an issue on github about this.
• I’ve created some additional Canon EOS Raw Tone Curve templates by copying from other templates. Unfortunately, Fabio seems to have gotten really sloppy with raw tone curves.
• I’ve uploaded the “classic tools” templates. I think that tech-wise, we’re at a point where we can do some real good for current LZ users, and for those who’ve reluctantly shelved LZ because it didn’t handle their camera models. I need some feedback from users on how well the new dcraw builds work for them, and what problems they run into. We can also start collecting requests for Raw Tone Curve templates from LZ users. I’m really not inclined to produce custom tone curves for every possible camera model — just the ones that LZ users have. In other words, I’m ready to “go public” and see what the users think.

github: Over the past year or two, github has become pretty much “the” site for hosting open-source development projects. 

There are still some on the older big sites like SourceForge and Google Code, but many of the projects there now say, “moved to github.” 

As an indication of github’s stature, THE Linux project is hosted there: https://github.com/torvalds/linux

At its heart, github is a repository for storing and sharing programming code where the project is being updated by multiple programmers. 

It allows the code to be kept private, for a fee, but for public code like ours github’s free. Anyone can download files from a public github project. Point your browser at the project, select the “code” button — which probably should be called “files” — and you’ll see the file/folder tree. Each folder can have a file called README (perhaps with an extension indicating what kind of markup it’s using), and github will automatically display that file at the bottom of the folder listing. There is an optional “issue tracker” that can be used for, um, tracking issues. It’s very simplistic, but I think it’ll do for us — at least for now — so I’ve got it turned on.

 

 

 

The github site, where Doug and Tex keep LightZone alive.

center filter with LightZone

Note: Lightcrafts, the company that developed LightZone, went out of business. Their web site is down, the owner works for Apple. Owners of LighZone can’t re-install LightZone because the registration server is not available anymore.

However, some very ambitious users could manage to update the current LZ version, provide some license server information, etc. Read all about the progress here

Because wide angle lenses for Rangefinder cameras and wide angle lenses for large format cameras have a light fall off from the center to the edges, it is necessary to use a center filter.

Due to the physical and optical construction, the light fall off of distortion free lenses is around 2 or 2.5 f-stops. Center filters correct this fall off: they feature a circular grey gradient, with the highest density in the center and zero density at the edges.

The advantage: Evenly exposed images.

The disadvantage: They swallow 2 to 2.5 f-stops light, which translates into increasing the exposure time by the factor 2 to 2.5. Even worse: they are going to ruin your bank account. Depending on the lens angle and mount size, they cost around 400 to 500 Euros per filter. If you have several wide angle lenses, you need a specific filter for each lens, so 3 filters sum up to 1.500 Euros in a worst case scenario.

There are situations where you can’t use a center filter, because the light situation won’t allow it. So far, so bad. The problem: how to iron out the light fall off. Alpa of Switzerland offers a software package to handle this, but – of course – only for the large format lenses they offer for their cameras.

So, after having spent almost 1.000 Euro on circular pol, grey and gradient grey filters, I needed a solution for two of my wide angle lenses. Then I had a vision and idea how to simulate a filter with LightZone, and it worked like a charm:

Load the image into LZ. Add one instance of the Zone Mapper tool. Activate Region Mode, select the Bezier Region tool and draw an ellipsoid by placing 4 points at the edges:

Resize the margin to approximately ¾ width of the image (see above).

Now comes the most important part: Invert the mask.

Adjust the dark areas by moving them up, so that the light fall off disappears. Done!

The effect is quite nice and (almost) perfect:

Original scan:

Corrected version (in addition to the center filter effect I’ve also adjusted the white balance):

Original scan:

Corrected version:

– all photographs © 1999-2010 by jens g.r. benthien –

LightZone and Large Format

Note: Lightcrafts, the company that developed LightZone, went out of business. Their web site is down, the owner works for Apple. Owners of LighZone can’t re-install LightZone because the registration server is not available anymore.

However, some very ambitious users could manage to update the current LZ version, provide some license server information, etc. Read all about the progress here

Post processing in ‘modern’ [= digital] photography usually is a snap with modern software like Aperture, Lightroom, et al. However, when it comes to real photography [= analog], most of the modern programs start to fail as soon as they have to deal with high resolution scanned images. But there is one notable exception: LightZone from Light Crafts. It’s a Java based piece of brilliant software which indeed does handle monster images like no other app on the market. Even with 130 MP [ MegaPixel ] images LightZone doesn’t slow down considerably, and best of all: it never crashes.

I had compared Aperture and Lightroom, loaded some of my monster images and they either didn’t respond anymore or crashed – and this on a stable iMac!

Just to give you an impression on how huge the images are, I’ve loaded a 12.600 x 8.400 pixel image into LightZone on my 24″ iMac:

The original image displayed @ ‘Fit’

Same image displayed @ 1:1. The plate is the one on the wall above the door on the right front side of the ermita.

Same image displayed @ 2:1

Same image displayed @ 4:1

In the lower right corner you will notice the tiny red rectangle [ dot ], which renders the part of the original image. You can grab the rectangle and move the image around the screen [something you shouldn't try with any other image editing software, unless you are prepared to walk to the next café and return in 30 minutes...]

I should mention that the 24″ iMac features a 24″ screen (diagonal), that means the base of the screen without any margins or the aluminium case measures 52 centimeters or 20,5 inches. Now imagine how big you can print this image. Oh no, no guesswork here, you can print it at a size of 6 x 4 meters @ 60 dpi – without having to enlarge it! 60 dpi is more than sufficient for this size.

OK, I think this should answer some questions of some newbies in the LightZone forum who want to know if LZ can handle ‘large’ images. The answer: Yes, definitely!

By the way: the last image resembles the same resolution as a 6×4 meter print, staying just 50 cm away from it – which is kind of very close for this image size.

Just today I’ve read the good news about Java on the Mac: though Apple won’t continue with the Java development, Oracle will do it. Which is the best news I’ve heard for a long time, because it means that LightZone will continue to run on my iMac.