LightZone is professional-level digital darkroom software.
Rather than using layers in the way that other photo editors do, LightZone lets the user build up a stack of tools which can be rearranged, readjusted, turned off and on, and removed from the stack.
It’s a completely non-destructive editor, where any of the tools can be re-adjusted or modified later — even in a different editing session. A tool stack can even be copied to a batch of photos at one time. LightZone always operates in a 16-bit linear color space with the wide gamut of ProPhoto RGB.
Features include:
- Non-destructive RAW editor. It treats the digital image original (typically a RAW file) as non-editable. When LightZone edits an original digital image, a new resulting post-edit image file is created (for example a new JPEG copy) and the original image file is left unaltered. By being non-destructive LightZone preserves the original “digital negative” which contains the maximum information originally captured by the camera, and allows additional images with different transformations to be produced from the original.
- Unlimited Layers – you can apply as many effects as you want to a photo
- Edits both RAW and JPEG format images.
- Create and apply pre-determined image transformations, called “styles”, to an entire batch of images in a single operation.
- Outputs JPEG files which contain metadata references to the original image file location and a record of the transformations applied during editing.
- Relight Tool – one-touch photo enhancing.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
- Internationalization support
Website: github.com/ktgw0316/LightZone
Support:
Developer: Masahiro Kitagawa, Michael Schulze, Pavel Benak and many others in the team
License: New BSD License

LightZone is written in Java. Learn Java with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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