After being rather too sceptical at first, I’ve been trying LightZone 2 and looking at its touted integration with Lightroom. I was going to make a longer posting but instead there is now a good article at Outback Photo on Lightroom and LightZone in Tandem.

While I now think the integration is a little more than hype, I don’t see any real place for LightZone when someone has the full version of Photoshop. Elements maybe. And LightZone still has a real problem with metadata. Let’s say you send a DNG file to LightZone. The TIF file begins its life with XMP data from a variety of sources such as Lightroom or iView. When LightZone saves the file, old style IPTC-IIM fields like description or copyright are still present and populated, but data in XMP fields is gone. So goodbye to any iView information like catalog sets or people, or any thing you may have added through a custom File Info panel in Bridge. More relevant to Lightroom, any Lightroom adjustment settings are gone from the file. It’s inexcusable that applications like Aperture and LightZone, both written long after IPTC-XMP’s introduction, fail to read it or strip it from your derivative files.