The LightZombie Project

April, 19, 2012: Within the next 48 hours, hopefully in the early morning hours (U.S. times...), these servers will be upgraded. This will probably mean an outage of service resulting in our site being off-line for 2-3 hours. Do not be alarmed, just check back later.

Once before we made a plea that we needed technical assistance for both MAC and Linux. Well, mate-ees, we still do. In fact so far we've gotten precious little. We're not kidding, we need some assistance in these areas especially. Lots of new camera profiles will need to be done this year. I will remind all of you that it is in your own best interests for this to happen. Support comes from the community collectively, now, and that is the only place it's coming from. We need to be able to hold on until this thing is truly open sourced.

Adobe Camera Raw version 6.7 came out as a Release Candidate a week ago. So, if things go as usual, we'll probably be seeing an updated dcraw version sometime toward the end of April.

The cameras announced as being newly supported in 6.7 RC are:

It's been about a month since I put the dcraw 9.12 builds into beta, and I haven't heard of any glitches. So I've now made 9.12 the standard dcraw version available for download.

If anyone needs a Raw Tone Curve that wasn't supplied with LightZone and we haven't already provided, do leave a request in the Raw Tone Curve forum.

Fujifilm has introduced a new camera and new sensor design at CES. The X-Trans sensor in the upcoming X-Pro1 camera uses a 6x6 color filter array with aperiodic spacing of the various color filters, which Fuji says permits them to leave off the low-pass (anti-aliasing) filters. Moiré from aliasing can still occur, but it's less likely to involve false color, which is what most people find objectionable.

I've added Raw Tone Curve templates for the following cameras: Nikon D3100, Nikon D5100, Nikon D7000, Sony SLT-A35, Sony SLT-A55, and Sony NEX-5N. It turns out that the last five all use the same sensor, so the Raw tone curve is the same for all of them.

A number of people have been having trouble figuring out just what to do with the files from LightZombie (or even how to get them), so I've put together some nearly-step-by-step instructions for each of the three environments. You'll find them linked at the top of the column on the left.

As I expected, dcraw 9.12 is out. It was released on Wednesday. As I expected, it contains support for the Fuji X10.

What I didn't expect was that LightZone didn't like it. The X10 raw conversions in LightZone were Teh Suck!!1! They were unacceptably noisy, even at minimum ISO. Furthermore, the DR200 and DR400 files were dark. I've spent three days learning a lot about EXR Raw files in general, X10 Raw files, and the older Fuji SuperCCD Raw files.

My Yule present to all of you, and totally guaranteed, unless you have non-photographic related problems, in which case all bets are off. Enough with all this technical mumbo-jumbo, no offense to you Doug, and all your hard work....First, open up your photo(s) in the browse program of your choice---this method works with all software programs, including LZ of course. Set this up first for reasons that will become apparent later. Maybe also make sure your photos are properly backed up.

I don't know where I got the Contrast Mask classic tool template from, but it wasn't right. It was simply a Tone Mapper classic tool with the default title changed. This isn't a major problem because Tone Mapper is pretty much a Contrast Mask tool with an added slider for Detail. The main advantage of the genuine Contrast Mask tool is that in the Tone Mapper tool, the Radius slider has a minimum value of 100. If you want the "flat lighting" effect that a smaller radius can give, you'll need the genuine Contrast Mask.