LightZone

A couple of weeks ago, when I first learned about LighZone, a photo editor, was opensourced, my reaction was "heck, even if it is Java, I should try it and compare with darktable", but the first impression was a failure: my access to the website is blocked! How dumb is for a FOSS project to blindly block all customers of the largest ISP from a country? What else they block? Angry, I made a screenshot and then forgot about it for a while.

Today I saw it again and decided to give another try, even if the main website is inaccessible, the real meat is open on GitHub, complete with installation instructions: there are even packages for Fedora, via the SUSE build system.
Too good to be true? Indeed! The package fails due a dependency on liblzma.so. So the screenshots below are made under Windows: After a few minutes with it, here's my quick comparison:

• the browser mode in LightZone has the features, but is slightly harder to use compared with darktable;
• in editing mode, LightZone is based on predefined styles: you pick one and then adjust parameters. With enough adjusting, you can probably get anywhere. Is beginner friendly, but I feel it limiting;
• for those who need that, darktable has the tethering mode;
• LightZone is truly multiplaform (is Java), while darktable pretty much Linux-only;
• in 5 minutes it crashed once.

My conclusion: LightZone is a cute app, geared for beginners which allows to get the job (RAW editing) done. Still, for a Linux user, I recommend darktable instead. For myself, I will stick with GIMP-UFRaw-File Manager and for my gf, who is using a proprietary app on Windows, I won't try to push LightZone either, she uses some tools (like the clone stamp) which I didn't find there.