Just thought I’d make people aware that the LightZone photo editing software is not dead and is still under development.
The website appeared to have gone dark and there had been quite a big gap since the last release of the software.
It now appears that the person that was looking after the site (Tex) is back on the scene after being seriously tied up with work for an extended period of time and the developer Masahiro has released version 4.2 which among other things has added lens correction using Lensfun.
This post on the LightZone contains the link to download the latest version of the software:
I think that its a piece of software that’s worth having around - it just needs a bit more love and maybe the developer could do with a hand (at the moment I think there’s only one).
If, and that means only if, Lightzone will allow downloads without registering, I would give a helping hand for optimisations as I did for LuminanceHdr, Filmulator and Siril.
I’ve just nipped back onto the LightZone site and posted a comment to make them aware of your offer of a helping hand (and the condition of allowing downloads without registering).
I’d agree that the registration to download policy is counter productive and alienates both users and potential developers.
I have no connection with the developer nor am I anything to do with running that LightZone website so I have no influence over them - I’m just an interested bystander.
Understandable, I see literally no reason for them to collect user information. Their explanation seems misguided:
“We are requiring membership for security purposes, to better track the downloads, and to help build the community in order to attract developers and improve the knowledge base.”
Agreed. There would be many more downloads if they weren’t forced to be tracked. And there would be more people to build a community around as a result. They’re (sadly) self-limiting all that with their registration.
Hello. Note that LightZone is written in Java. This means that low-level optimisation is much harder, as machine code is only generated at runtime, and the toolset (profiler etc) is also different from the C/C++ projects. Some excellent sites on the topic are https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/ (unfortunately, not updated for a long time) and https://shipilev.net/ (has lots of info, including analysis of the generated machine code).
Some of the challenges are also different (e.g. user experience may be bad due to producing too much garbage, and/or a badly tuned garbage collector).
Just thought I’d let you know that there have been some developments on the LightZone website (or at least there are about to be) - Tex who runs the site has added the following post:
Based on a thread that was started here a while back, and its updates, we are looking to open up downloading so that no registration is required. We’ll still require it for the forums. Therefore you will see a clean-up of this front page soon, and separate direct links for developers and the rest of us. So, watch this space…
I think he wants to keep the registration for the Forum as he’s worried about it turning nasty - at the moment it is probably one of the more civilized ones around.
The registration seems to be a smoke screen anyway, given there’s windows and mac binaries on the github releases (and for linux there are probably distro packages?).
Hello. This scarcity in a way can compromise the Lightzone project for the end. My wishes for that don’t happen. An alternative would be to raise funds for the project. Maybe it’s good or not. I leave you as an example Krita and Blender. It’s been working.
Just updating everyone regarding Tex’s work towards removing the registration requirement to download the software - he admits that unfortunately it has been going slowly.
To quote from his post on the LightZone website itself:
Finally was able to speak with my Drupal guru last evening, and he is going to be taking a look at a couple of things before I ruin something inadvertently. We are also still running on Drupal 7, so we may be doing an upgrade there, and I finally want to see about a refresh of at least the welcome page—I was attempting to do this some years ago but it’s not as easy as it would seem. It will probably be easier now.
The other thing is that the developer for the software wants to get out of Spideroak and they need to see if we can just go with Github or need to host on the website’s server, and how much that will cost…
Btw nice features, lensfun integration for what i’ve tried doesn’t work or make ca worser, nice bw conversion with zones, but after i added some effects, it took something like 15 minutes to develop a picture, with an i5 3470 and 16 gb of ram, under ubuntu mate 18.04.
Ok i was streaming video meanwhile, but streaming took about 30% cpu, 370% was free…
But really good to know it is still updated i obtained a very nice bw!
Just letting you know that the requirement for registration to download the program has been removed by Tex - which he has announced on the LightZone site.