Zone System Software

Hi,

 

this might be interest in this forum:

 

I am the CTO of a small company, Light Crafts (www.lightcrafts.com), where we have made

a software that implementation of the Zone System.

 

Uwe Steinmueller has a review:

 

http://www.outbackphoto.com/artofraw/raw_26/essay.html

 

and I have set up a Blog and a tutorials web site where I try to offer some background:

 

http://fricc.blogspot.com/

 

http://web.mac.com/fabio.riccardi/iWeb/Site/Blog/Blog.html

 

I would love if you could take a look at it and give us some feedback.

 

Best Regards,

 

- Fabio

Ordinarily, I don't like to see posts here that look like advertising. But since this product is in the early stages of development, and is thus not available for purchase, the post can't technically be called a solicitation.

 

And I must say, it looks like an awfully promising tool. I really like the implementation of zone selection. I'm not sure it would be easy for me to add LightZone into my existing workflow, but I'm going to try it out for a time and see what I think anyway.

 

It seems like we're still in the early days of digital image manipulation. Just when we think we've seen everything, along comes a fresh approach to the problems real photographers face.

 

Good luck to you!

Alright, so there is a purchase option. Shame for hawking wares on this forum.

 

But it's a really cool ware(s).

Ermm?<br>Since the Zone system is a way of <i>pre-visualising</i> your image, and then <i>linking that vision to exposure and development</i>, I can't see how post-processing and scanning software can have anything to do with the zone system as we know it.<p>Am I missing something? Or is this software actually nothing to do with Ansel Adam's zone system at all, apart from using his idea of splitting the grey scale into 10 zones?

I think Pete raises a valid question. But I also think Fabio already provides the answer with his programme. He makes, in my view, a valiant effort to link the "negative" to the final output, keeping the tools of the Zone System as the working tools in the Digital Darkroom. You may recall that Ansel himself considered the negative as the score and the print as the performance. When printing, he very much used the intuition provided by the zone system to get the output (in black and white values) he strived for. We now can emulate him with this new programme, even using the 10 zones in a rather handfast manner to accomplish the same thing.

 

I find this to be a major achievement. Let's just hope that Fabio can arrive at a superior programme, by combining this feature with the best features of Photoshop, necessary for getting beautiful b/w and color prints, based on digital or scanned originals.

 

Good luck to you Fabio!!!!