This reply from Steve onLightzone forum probably explains the lack of activity; Tex is the website maintainer while the primary developer is Masahiro. Both are very busy with other endeavors. Many on this list are not developers and few have been website designers or developers. I have limited skills as well and even fewer resources at my disposal. Until the recent closing on my house, I’ve been very busy in that project. I can’t speak for anyone else but I can’t imagine any resentment in having a presence on the Pixels website. After all LZ is an open sources project as well. I do see Lightzone listed under Raw processors but it simply links back to here. Steve
So can we have a sub-forum for Lightzone? That might just help keep lightzone alive if not kicking.
I engaged Tex in some discussions about about a more engaging web presence for LightZone.
I get it, he’s busy with other things, but perhaps it’s time to let go of the reigns a bit and allow others to help. There’s not much interest in doing things differently even though LZ is dying the death of a thousand cuts.
I used to work for a guy who would often say:
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him bathe in it”…
Eh, I’m looking at the LZ site and not finding a Windows install file in that GitHub section. I’m a Win10 user with not a lot of programming skills. Can someone point me in the right direction? TIA.
Hi Just letting you know I have attempted to contact Tex who ran the LightZone website in an attempt to see if there is any chance of it ever getting up and running again (if I get a response I will pass on the result here).
Note that the person that develops the software is not the same person that ran/runs the webpage - and he does still seem to be actively developing it (for example he has recently released a 4.2.5 version - though for some reason that update is for Mac computers). The developer is Masahiro Kitagawa and the software is still available to download at https://github.com/ktgw0316/LightZone
Pat David - as the original download link is taking people to a dead page, would it be possible to update the link on the software page at Pixls to the one listed above if you don’t mind.
Saying all that, I genuinely have no idea how many users are left. Can’t be many.
Similarly, it’s been literally years since I’ve played with LZ. Has it been so far surpassed by wonderful things like ART and such that it’s no longer worth the time/effort?
If it’s deemed a good idea, then great. If not, we can let LZ fade off into the wilderness…
Hello, I’m Masahiro Kitagawa, the developer of LightZone. I’ve just joined PIXLS.US today and this is my first post here.
Although the lightzoneproject .org is not reachable for months, developing of the LightZone still continues. It is actually at very slow pace because I’m busy for another project these days, but LZ is not dying.
(For historical reason, there are some other Github repositories used by the LZ project. AntonKast’s one is the original one from Light Crafts, and Aries85’s one have been used as a stable master branch and for issue reports.)
Regarding the subforum, I’m not certain enough what it is, but I think it would be great for users to have a good place to talk about LZ, no matter whether the lightzoneproject .org comes back soon or not.
Thank you very much for keeping interest in the LightZone alive.
Glad to hear the project is still alive and kicking (it does have it’s fans!).
A subforum here would basically give you a forum for the project without having to worry about any of the backend stuff or maintaining it. We can include a subforum alongside the other project like here:
It would be best if someone could step forward from the project or lightzone community to be a moderator for the subforum - i’ll make you a mod of course, but if you let me know someone else that is willing I’ll add them.
We have a FAQ that covers our community guidelines and conduct as well as a Terms of Service. We also have a large community of passionate photographers, programmers, and general nerds.
I’ll setup your category now and post an announcement site-wide shortly to welcome the project.
We’ve got myself if you have any questions/needs/etc as well as our @staff to help out. @darix is our sysadmin and @paperdigits is the Original Gangster.
Hello @patdavid and community. My name is Steve over from the old LZ community. Remc19 is the one who informed us of the interest from this community. I’ve been using LZ for years. For those not familiar with LZ, may I suggest the YouTube video tutorials found here. Also a Primer for LZ usage can be found here. Here is one more resource on the Ansel Adams system and what LZ was originally based on.
I may be interested in moderating the sub-forum but may have limited time available.
I just tried to use the Wayback Machine to see if I could find old forum information. Click HERE to view what the website looked like back in 2021. Oddly some of the important links (IMO), are banned by Wayback.
For a wealth of information and tutorials, albeit older, click HERE.
Click HERE to view Doug Pardee, the original developer’s LZ Wiki Github page. Pay particular attention to the right hand side links, with the Project DCraw and the Tone Curve Math being the most interesting to me.
I just wandered into this room this morning while enjoying one of my ‘senior moments’. I explored a couple of the youtube videos and (finally) found out how to install a Linux version running under Mint 21, from a PPA (not my favourite method, btw).
I have to say that I am greatly impressed by this project, which has been completely below my radar until this morning. Much as I have committed myself to darktable over the last 3 years since ‘escaping’ from Lightroom, I feel that LZ might be able to do things on some of my images that I am unable to do in darktable (or RT), because of personal limitations in being able to understand those raw processors in sufficient detail.
I look forward to using LZ more and would exhort darktable and RT users to give it a try too. This project deserves far more coverage than it gets - in my opinion.
Can you elaborate…I did use it a little maybe 6 or 7 years ago and while it was clever in some ways it was already a bit long in the tooth and the tools covered the basics but were not comprehensive for many things…what is it that you find about it that would make it worthy of attention… examples are always better than words…
