'Lightroom' V. 'Lightzone'

According to various sites on the web, Adobe launches the finalised first version of 'Lightroom' today, presumably in the USA first. There is an introductory price but eventually the normal retail price will be 299 US$/euro, so it looks like the usual £299 for us suckers!

I have tried hard to get my sad old brain around the 'mindless complexities' of 'lightroom' but as with most of Adobe's enigma wrapped arcane mysteries, I reached 'glaze over' quite quickly.....

So, expecting to soon be in need of a good RAW converter/editor which I might be able to afford both in terms of price and learning curve, I have been drawn to a product called, confusingly, 'Lightzone'.

Unlike the Adobe product, this is software which immediately appeals to me in that everything on the website and it's tutorials is easily understandable from a conventional photography viewpoint, especially for those of us who have been used to working by matching image dynamic range and contrast to that of our film stock.

Essentially, 'LightZone' is a very versatile, non-destructive image editor which works by being able to accurately map all/any tones or other areas for modification. The original file is unaltered so no 'save as' is used and the modifications are only added when the file is passed for printing etc. The alteration file is kept and can be used for other images or batches of images. Changes to contrast are particularly good in 'LZ' as individual tones of the image are visualy placed on a digital 'D logE' curve/step wedge, and then moved up/down.....vastly better than Adobe's 'curves' for serious phtotgraphers used to any version of 'Zone System'.

'LZ' is only about a hundred quid and is designed by a European rather than Adobe mindset. It seems to me to be intuitive and elegant where 'Lightroom' is crude and complicated.......does anyone here use 'LightZone', and how have you found it in use?

Looks quite good, but:

Does it support PEFs?
Does the cheap version permit batch processing?
Does it's RAW conversion come anywhere near the quality of Silkypix?

That's what enquiring minds need to know.

G

the Linux version (which is free) claims support for the K10D because its based on the latest version of DCRAW.

Unfortunately, try as I might I can't get it to run.

Unlike some of the earlier Pentax DSLR's the K10D allows images to be saved as DNG format. (Well done Pentax for conforming to what is now pretty well an industry standard)

I don't understand why everybody is so taken by converting PEF from the K10D. If you take the pics in DNG then nearly every product on the market will convert it to TIFF, JPG etc... (Mac's need conversion through Adobe DNG converter first, it's free)

Now I know that DNG gives less images to a card but if it's more universal and saves £100's then so what. Cards are so cheap you can save that money by buying just 1 extra card.

Many camera manufacturers try to lock you to their own software by only using their own RAW format. Pentax have done a good job here by allowing DNG files which most (possibly all) of your existing software will work so wht not use it. :

If you want to but expensive upgrade / new software to read PEF files from the K10D fine; but I urge you consider the cheaper, reliable, known options first. Why learn something new and why pay all that money when you've just spent your savings on the K10D which will work with your existing software.

K10D PEF's are compressed to save space. DNG's are not compressed. The main benefit in PEF's is you get more on a card. That said, I'm happy with DNG.

Absolutely Mannesty, I can so no difference in image quality and 1 spare card is less than a software upgrade

I think you are forgetting the extra hard drive space. If you shoot a lot, as I do, then you have to factor in another couple of hundred quid for additional drive costs.

G

I like Lightroom and have been using it for a several months now. I can't compare it to any other software as I've not tried anything else. I've pre-ordered it and by all accounts it is much faster and a more finished product than the last Beta version.

You're quite right George if you have a lot of pics then an extra drive is handy, I just got a 260gb SATA from PC World for £60.

But I would argue that as the PEF files are much larger than the old ones a new drive becomes necessary anyway.

The PEF's from my *istD are around 13Mb, how big are the ones from the K10D?

Dan

PEF's are smaller than the D at 10 - 11 Mb. DNG's are larger at about 16Mb.

I've just done some tests with the file formats on the K10D with un-expected results

All file sizes in Mb

DNG Convert uses Adobe DNG converter (free) Settings -
JPG Preview - None (8.56 with full size preview)
Compressed Lossless - Yes (if you turn off file size increases to 19.9)
Preserve Raw Image – Yes
Embed Original File - Yes
File Extension - .DNG

If you open the DNG file made with the DNG converter it is exactly the same as the original. So looks to me that you can save all that drive space just by converting the DNG.

BTW - With some software on the MAC you must do this conversion first to allow the MAC to read it.

PS Please excuse the lines this software won't allow tabs (Moderator note: I've prettified the table for you Matt )

The results aren't that unexpected... at least to me

The Huffman tree compression used in-camera is not as efficient, in terms of space, when compared with the DNG Huffman compression. I think the Adobe method is a double tree (like the Canon RAW format) that will give greater compression.

However, the camera uses a single tree - which results in a good compression in a shorter time. Of course, the PC has loads more processing power and can chomp its way through the maths to squish it down more.

It is also interesting that the DNG converter, when asked to "embed the original" is not actually doing that when converting DNG-to-DNG. If you took an *ist-D PEF file and did that the resulting DNG would be the PEF size plus the size of the DNG alone.

It might be more interesting to see if there are any appreciable processing time differences when handling PEF, DNG, compressed DNG within each RAW converter... a job for later

Matt

As I've got nothing better to do today I thought I'd try Matt's suggestion.
And before you ask this isn't a my machine is better than yours thread it's trying to see which software is fastest.

Pentax RAW using Pentax Photo Lab – 20s
Pentax RAW using Silkypix 3.0 – 20s
16.1Mb DNG using Silkypix 3.0 – 24s
8.73Mb DNG using Silkypix 3.0 – 20s
16.1Mb DNG using PS CS2 10s (PS CS3 8s)
8.73Mb DNG using PS CS2 8s (PS CS3 8s)

All outputs were to highest quality JPG files and all looked much the same.

It's still down to which software you prefer but if you are looking for speed then Photoshop (PS CS2 or 3) is bar far the quickest.

I cannot check PEF speed on PS because it won't support it from the K10D.