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  • Welcome to the new site. Here's a thread about the update where you can post your feedback, ask questions or spot those nasty bugs!

LightZone Photo Contest With Leica M8 Image

Fabio Riccardi

New member
Hi Everybody,

as announced already Uwe Steinmueller is hosting a new LightZone contest, this stime the contest is based on a Leica M8 image of Uwe's. The sample adjustments (color and B&W) are a collaboration between Uwe and me.

http://www.outbackphoto.com/contest/contest_24/essay.html

Previous contests were a revelation to us, many readers used LightZone in extremely imaginative ways, let us see what you can do! :)

have fun, cheers,

- Fabio
 

Ray West

New member
Hi Fabio,

I thought it would be nice to see what a larger/Leica digital image looked like, so I downloaded, and fired up LZ.
Well, sadly LZ is slow, or rather my 1.8GHz opteron 144, with 2gb ram is slow. I tried selecting the 'orange tree' towards the centre of the scene, using the region selection tool. Virtually impossible to generate an accurate shape, the latency was too great. Eventually the system crashed with a java error of some sort, which may or may not have been emailed to you. I think there is a performance issue, to say the least, when working with larger files. It will be interesting to see what others find.

Best wishes,

Ray
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
In support of Ray, the LZ has been very instable on my machine too.
I have downloaded and played around with it for a couple of weeks.
While I certainly liked the results I was getting, I have unfortunately discovered that it would expend to fill all the RAM on my machine (which is 4 GB, Win XP Pro with the 3GB switch, Athlon X2 4400), after which the system slowed down considerably and then eventually crashed, each and every time I ran LZ. It's a shame that I had to stop using it waiting for a more stable version in the future, hopefully.

Cheers,

Cem

Disclaimer: I DID like the LZ as a program very much and its functionality, I just did not like the instability it brought along...
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
There's no doubt that the paradigm of LZ is brilliantly intuitive; More so, if you have ever read anything about Ansel Adams and the Zone system.

The Zone system is taught in all photography schools. It's concepts were worked out for black and white film. Creating a fine print is a process with many steps. The first is producing the best possible negative to print the photograph as the photographer previsualized it. Once mastered, the Zone System allows photographers to consistently control the tonal range in the negative. Formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in 1939/40, the Zone System is a set of techniques that allows photographers the greatest possible control over the characteristics of black-and-white film. The system works best with sheet film, which can be exposed and developed one piece at a time. This film becomes the negative used in printing the photograph. LZ applies this to digital images. Other programs such as Apple's Aperture use that concept too.

The introduction you must read is by Norman Karen. Using these concepts for digital files successfully will, IMHO, be worth the effort.

Asher
 

Ray West

New member
Hi Asher,

Maybe you, as a Mac guy, could download lz and the Leica image, and have a quick play. I would really like it to work well, but it is a tad unreliable for me (and Cem) under windows.

After all, it is an M8 image, which looks OK, almost as good as a 5D ;-)


Best wishes,

Ray
 

Herman Teeuwen

New member
No problems here on Windows XP machine with Pentium 4 3.2 GHz with 3GB RAM.

No crashes or problems with selection tools. Not the fastest RC around, but everything very similar to working with NEF's from my Nikon D200.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Ray and Cem,

I wonder whether LZ is dependant on a higher level Graphics Card such as Apple's Aperture is? Some programs are more RAM dependant.


Asher
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Hi Asher,

It is a possibility certainly worth considering. However, I have got an nVidia GeForce 7800 GT PCI-e graphics card with 256 MB memory in my machine, which is definitely high level enough for all purposes :). And yes, I am using the latest nVidia drivers. LR runs like a charm on my machine, no problems at all.

Since I liked LZ, I will reinstall it on a clean system and give it a try again, when and if I can find the time.

Cheers,

Cem
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Uwe Steinmueller said:
LZ needs quite a bit of memory. If you have about 1.5GB installed give about 650MB to LZ. Too much will more hurt than help.

Uwe
Uwe,

That's counterintuitive! Could you explain? If there's 4GB what would be the assignment to LZ?

How does this work?

Asher
 

Fabio Riccardi

New member
Hi Everybody,

LightZone does very well with 650M with typical high-end DSLR images. If you need medium format resolution (20-40MPixels) you better assign 1GB to 1.5GB to LightZone. More than that doesn't really help.

- Fabio
 

Ray West

New member
Hi Fabio,

Having played some more, I think the M8 image, when editing with lz, hovers below 500MB.

Some years ago, when I was building NLE systems, (non linear editing - for video) it was important to have, more or less, a clean machine, i.e. all it did was run the nle software. I suspect, if I cleaned off the antivirus, and all the rest of the background windows stuff, the latency may be reduced. Also, when it crashed, it presented a number of options, including emailing yourselves, so I guess there is some overhead in logging, for sending error reports, etc.

Fiddling with the rendering preferences has some effect too, changing from automatic rendering (all the time) may work better, further down the line, when I am more familiar with the controls.

Thanks for your feedback,

Best wishes,

Ray
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Ray,

Are you looking at realtime memory usage or are you merely reporting what you assign to LZ?

Asher
 

Ray West

New member
Hi Asher,

In windoze xp, the threee fingered salute gets up the task manager, and if you select the processes tab, you get cpu and mem usage for each process image. The M8 image is less than 500MB when I'm 'working on it', I guess the memory usage grows the more complex the editing becomes, but I've not got it above 500MB for the limited playing I've done with the M8 image (Its less for my smaller 20D images. ) If I look at the rest of the 'background' tasks, that accounts for another 500MB or so. It is not a memory issue, But I suspect with judicious pruning of other processes, I could get it running a bit faster, since these other tasks will be grabbing the cpu, from time to time.

In LZ, you can asign the max size of memory, by means of a slider - It works fine if set to 640MB, as Fabio mentioned, which leaves more space for the rest of the 'background' stuff to run.

Anyway, without bothering with any of this, it becomes much more useable, if you avoid setting the interactive rendering to 'all the time'.

I can see me having to buy this, just so I can nag Fabio and co. into concentrating on what it does well, and in improving the gui, and speed. However, I think the downside will be that I'll be out in the cold with the camera, instead of inside in the warm playing at pp. This is really a very, very simple and intuitive approach to digital editing.

There are a few (four) pdf tutorials on the site. The hdr one, could not be simpler. with a bit more tweaking, you can get it better, obviously, but for a straight out of the box job, it does the job.

Best wishes,

Ray

(I think I'm getting past it - did I actually say I was going to spend some money????, on software... again)
 

Fabio Riccardi

New member
LightZone 2.0.3

Hi Everybody,

LightZone 2.0.3 is out!

We have numerous bug fixes and enhancements, please check it out!

Cheers,

- Fabio
 

Ray West

New member
Hi Dierk,

The updates sometimes seems to be a bit 'iffy'( noted on their forum). But, I am only using the demo version, 20 days to go. I went to the lz site, the downloads page, downloaded and installed 2.03, no problems, other than rekeying the demo code they sent me after I couldn't install 2.02 ('cos I had an old v1 around) . Apparently I should have uninstalled the version 2.02 first, but I didn't know/do that. Like you have found, the update thing for 2.02 did not show that 2.03 was ready, but 2.03 is running fine for me, now.

hth.

Best wishes,

Ray
 

Dierk Haasis

pro member
Fabio, it was just a note, no blaming. As you know I am a real fan of Lightzone and would see it improved [I guess you read my review*]. Currently the - small and big - problems let me use LZ only if I cannot use Capture NX, i.e. if I have to clone out something or want to go the whole cahoona in one program [NX does neither support CRW nor DNG].

Performance of LZ is still a little flaky, slowing down gradually over its running time, it sometimes crashes [I guess because it runs out of memory], opens two instances when called from other programs through Windows command line ... Most of these are, again a guess, due to using Java as platform.



*If not, I sent the link to Mr Karney, who I met at photokina, some weeks ago: http://www.photo-i.co.uk/Reviews/software/Lightzone/LightZone.htm
 

Fabio Riccardi

New member
Hi Dierk,

performance issues are not due to Java, quite otherwise.

LightZone is the most complex and advanced image editor out there, you have no idea of the complexity of the imaging pipeline we built. If it wasn't for Java we would have never managed in the same time frame.

Maybe you noticed that LightZone is the only application that allows non destructive image editing with layers, masks and blending modes. The only other app with layers and masks has been developed over a time span of more than 20 years... and it is quite a bit clankier and destructive...

Light Crafts is a small company and we are constantly under the pressure of releasing new features that our customers ask for, we don't have the luxury of having a year long release cycle... QA is suffering a bit. Now that 2.0 shipped and most features we decided to implement are there, reliability is going to be our next big milestone.

Give us some time and LighZone will fly.

Cheers,

- Fabio
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Well Fabio,

We're very much behind you. The better you are the our better pictures can be.

How have you managed to be able to accomodate Jamie Robert's profiles?

He needs to think it's C1. So perhaps it needs a profile to get it to the C1 look and then his profile will work as this trick is apparently being used with RAW developer.

Asher
 

Dierk Haasis

pro member
Fabio Riccardi said:
performance issues are not due to Java, quite otherwise.

[...]

Maybe you noticed that LightZone is the only application that allows non destructive image editing with layers, masks and blending modes.

[...]

Give us some time and LighZone will fly.

If you say so, I believe you that Java is not the problem. I know that there are applications based upon it that work quite well, like Azureus and Trillian, both of which, incidentally, suffer from similar problems as Lightzone. While Azureus does not slow down itself or the computer, it takes forever to load; Trillian, OTOH, degrades with running time.

Since I am not a programmer I can only trust that nobody in his right mind would use another [superfluous] layer of interpretation if it has no advantages.

As far as your claim about uniqueness goes, well, a case can be made - support for file formats is instrumental for that - that you are right. Actually you are not, Nikon Capture NX with all its drawbacks (UI, .NET Framework, clone/heal missing) is a very complex image editor - non-destructive, layers, masking, blending modes.

Don't get me wrong, I was among the first to propagate your program, I know of at least three people taking a look at it because I raved about it, two having bought it. If it weren't for performance, some very odd design decisions and bugs LZ may be my No 1 tool for image optimisation. Although I did not dream me writing this when I finished my review for Capture NX, I have to do it: currently I prefer NX.* BTW, Photoshop, the one you allude to, I use only for compositing, that is, seldom.

As for your last statement I refer you to my private message and my e-mail address.



*This needs a little qualification: Invoking LZ from within iView MediaPro is very problematic while Capture NX works flawlessly. The same criticism I have about using Java applies to Nik/Nikon choosing .NET Framework. One thing I really love is the way I can save any changes to a file - NEF, TIFF, JPEG - back to an NEF, making it non-destructive. The changes are still reflected through thumbnail and embedded preview, making it ideal for use with DAM software. It also brings down organisational overload since I don't have to save several TIFFS and JPEGs alongsinde the original for different uses.
 
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