In LightZone - The Review I extolled the virtues of Lightcraft’s LightZone image editing software. In this post I will use 3 examples to go into more detail about how this remarkably intuitive application can quickly and easily enhance images that you may have given up on. I should say here that I have no connection with Lightcraft, I’m just a paying customer like any other. The more I learn about LZ the more indispensable it’s becoming.

The 3 images I’m going to talk about here have languished in my Aperture library for some time now as “nearly rejects” if for no other reason than I could never quite emulate my original vision of how they should look. Obviously, being digital, they all started life as color shots - very colorful too I might add. That’s not really my style and I kind of always envisaged them as monochrome but each had problems that I could overcome only in LightZone with it’s extensive and intuitive tonal controls.

Here’s image number one:

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This image started life as a pink rose on a blue background - sort of “hits you between the eyes color contrast”. Converting it to B&W in Aperture (my usual working method) never really got me in the ballpark of tonal ranges that I wanted, even with Aperture’s quite extensive controls. I had come across some B&W templates in the LightZone Forum, kindly posted there by Jacek Gozdz, and so I gave them a go. The speed and control available using Jacek’s templates as a starting point quickly enabled me to tweak the conversion to exactly what I needed. Adding a Tonemapper layer (a sort of semi automatic, but still tweakable, contrast boost) plus a Zonemapper layer for a finely controllable last tonal tweak got me all the way there. Finally I added a couple of Color Balance layers from a template I had made myself for the toning effect I call my Palladium Split Tone because it somewhat mimics a warm Platinum/Palladium print look. Total time - 5 minutes.

Image number two:

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The image above was of a white flower slightly side, mostly frontally, lit with a softbox. Getting the contrast range of such a subject right while still retaining the delicacy of the tones can be notoriously difficult. Anyway, conversion to B&W same as the previous example plus two Tonemapper layers (two because I masked out and controlled separately the extreme top right corner of the image) allowed me infinitely fine Zone System like control of the final rendition. Although it’s close in concept to the original Zone System the methodology of LZ allows control you could never replicate in a conventional darkroom. The final step added a slight overall warm tone to the image and Bob’s your auntie’s husband, as we say here in the UK. Once again, total time was a few minutes.

Here’s image number three:

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This image proved particularly intractable - it’s actually a magenta colored Gerbera on a yellow background. Using the same steps as I used with the previous images got me tantalizingly close but, well, the image was still a little, shall we say, flat. Tonal range alone wasn’t really cutting it so I added a Warm/Cool Split Tone with a couple of Color Balance layers. With this method in LZ you can quickly and visually control the overall spread of your chosen toning colors in the shadows and highlights and therefore also how they blend in the midtones. Result, one intractable image problem solved in - you’ve guessed it! - a few minutes.

One last thing before I finish. As is my usual working method I finished the images and then left them back in my Aperture library for a day or so. Every now and again I would bring them up and stare at them for a while. I find this is a really important step as invariably I will take them back into LZ for one final tweak. Opening them again in LZ after their round trip back to Aperture is no problem - they open with all previous edits live and ready for fine tuning. Were I to use Lightroom instead of Aperture the same would still apply.

Oh dear, I’m now sorely tempted to go back and reedit some of my old images. Even the ones I had edited before in LZ as I’ve since learnt more of its secrets. On the other hand, perhaps I should learn where to draw the line!