The LightZombie Project is now up and running. We have a blog, forums, a mailing list (of sorts), and a Twitter feed. We have download links for the final LightZone 3.9 install packages from Light Crafts and a link to help you recover your license key if you lost it. We have updated dcraw
files for Windows, Mac, and Linux to allow handling of Raw files from camera models that came out after 3.9, and we have some Raw Tone Curves for some of those camera models. We're taking requests for Raw Tone Curves, too.
We've got someone to run the forums and such, and we've got techies for Windows and Linux. We could really use a Mac techie, and we could also use someone to sort EXIF/metadata glitches in Raw files.
Welcome, LightZone users. Our goal is to keep LZ working for you.
Welcome aboard, and of course please register and be an active participant, even if it's only to drop by and give us a "hello" post. An active forum is a healthy one. What you see now is our version 1.0, and I certainly hope we will be able to improve the site over time. We are using Drupal to configure and run it, and none of us are really up to speed on Drupal yet, but we will be. We chose it over WordPress for some functionality (and other) reasons that I hope will make things easier to expand if we need to. We have plans for galleries and tutorial pages and maybe a blog. But rather than wait until we had full functionality for all our dreams, Doug and I felt like this was good enough to go public to cement our community, and so we decided to delay no further. You will note that there is a "website comments" area in the forums, so please do use it! I have been very gratified to get messages from most of you about this project, with more people coming out of the woodwork daily. So I say again: please participate as much as you can.
And now for some special thanks due from all of us to particular individuals. First and foremost, we all owe a significant debt of gratitude to Doug Pardee, without whose work this last several weeks this project would probably not have happened, who has done the initial set up of both this website and begun the development project over at Github, and whose work on new raw profiles promises to do more than just keep LZ alive on life-support. Just incredible, Doug! Then to Blaze Miskulin of Geek Niche, who immediately offered free hosting for the project and has also helped behind the scenes getting us rolling, including setting up an optional test site in WordPress. Thanks to Marcelo Anelli, whom you may remember from the old forums as the Linux forums moderator, who has now jumped in to help out with Linux here. Thanks also to Jens Benthien who posted our messages about the project on his own website and onto several others that he frequents. Finally, thanks to all of you who participated in the LZ forums before, in beta testing prior versions of LZ, and who have helped get the word out about this great software, and especially: Grant Perkins for his work as a forums moderator for the previous LZ forums; Brian Mosely for his work as an LZ evangelist; Uwe Steinmueller for the same; Reto Hadorn for his incisive comments and analysis on the old forums; and Sebastien Abric for his really fine French website(s), one devoted solely to LZ (www.lightzone-fr.com), the real predecessor to this site. And of course, here's a shout out to our old friend Jacek Gozdz!