LightZone

Yes, Photoshop is the most powerful image-editing application in the world, but it’s also a great, blundering battleship of a thing that’s not half as clever as it thinks it is. And it takes a program like LightZone to show you just where Photoshop is going wrong.

First, there’s the interface. It’s just so simple. Open an image and it scales to fill the window space, leaving just a vertical pane on the left with a greyscale ZoneFinder at the top. If you click the ZoneMapper tool you can see how this works. As you move the mouse pointer over the zones in the ZoneMapper step wedge, they highlight in yellow. Want to move a midtone up a couple of zones? Just click and drag.

You can add anchor points or handles to the ZoneMapper to fix zones while moving others, which is directly analogous to Photoshop’s curves. There is, however, a difference. In Photoshop, curves adjustment in the shadows will progressively compress tones in the highlights. In LightZone, the compression occurs just ahead of your adjustment, which means you can lighten shadows while leaving the midtones and highlights with most of their original saturation.

You can also apply a Contrast Mask (similar to Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight tool), change Hue/ Saturation and colour balance, apply sharpening, noise reduction, cloning and a Channel Mixer.

All your adjustments appear as tools stacked in the vertical pane. These tools are like Photoshop Adjustment Layers, in that you can re-edit and re-arrange them.

In addition to fixing the whole image, you can also apply changes to selections or ‘regions’. There’s a twist here, too. These aren’t bitmap-based selections but vector masks that can be constantly re-edited.

And it gets better. You can save the tool stack along with the image for re-editing, but this means using a proprietary LightZone format, which your image cataloguing software won’t be able to read.

An insurmountable hurdle? No. LightZone can save a JPEG or TIFF ‘preview’ (but full-resolution) file with the changes made in the tool stack embedded as metadata, together with the location of the original file. This image can be opened by other applications like any other TIFF or JPEG. But if you open it with LightZone, it reads the metadata, finds the original file and reconstructs the tools stack. That’s not just clever, that’s inspired.

LightZone comes in two versions – the full program comes with a file browser and sells for $150 (£80), but the RT (Retouch) version is cheaper at $100 (£54) and will dovetail neatly with your existing cataloguer. This is the version we’d recommend.

This is an innovative image-editor. At the very least you should download it and try it out. It doesn’t match Photoshop as an all-round design tool, but if your priority is straightforward photo enhancement, you will be deeply impressed.