Light Crafts is the commercial editor of LightZone, a multi-platform image editor. It supports mainly the Windows and Mac OS X platform, and it is not free: one has to pay for the software and it is not open source. LightZone integrates well into the photographer image work flow, offering a nice browsing experience and various tools to enhance zone of one’s photographs.
However, a Linux enthusiast (Anton Kast) at Light Crafts has managed to port LightZone to Linux and his company allows him to distribute this version free of charge. It is not free software, but that is still a really nice initiative from this company and its employee. Thank you Anton and Light Crafts 
The new release, stamped 2.4, is available for download: LightZone 2.4 for Linux (
alternate link if the previous one does not work. Click on “Read more” for more information)
The new LightZone release brings the following enhancements:
- New vibrancy tool: increase colour vividness
- New RAW adjustments tool: controls the RAW conversion
- Improved tone mapper and red-eye correction tools
- New supported digital cameras (Nikon D40, Pentax K10D, etc.)
- New translation (Italian and Polish)
- Probably a few bugs
Check the LightZone release announcement for more detailed information.
Update (2007-05-30): Light Craft web site has been recently re-organised. During the time being the Linux section is accessible at the following address: http://www-old.lightcrafts.com/linux/
The normal address which one can find in the above article will be working shortly, once the web site migration is really completed. LightZone for Linux is not dead, see Anton message.
Update (2008-08-18): LightZone 2.4 is now an old version which is no longer available for download on LightCraft web site. Linux is not forgotten, the latest version of LightZone at the time of update is available for our Pinguin. However, now you can only try it out for 30 days and then you have to purchase it, just like on the other platforms.
Thank you for the alternate link. I was looking for LightZone on Linux and getting desperate to find a correct download link.
By the way, this is a short and nice overview of the software! Keep the good work.
Thanks Sunlight, the alternate link is just for the time being. I hope that Light Crafts will continue committing to the Linux version of LightZone and soon update there site, and even (let’s hope) release LightZone 3.0 for Linux.
There are no real alternative to LightZone now on Linux, although some are looking really promising like blueMarine, which is Free Software. However, blueMarine is still in beta and in my testing, I had a few stability problem. Hopefully the coming RC1 will be usable, and in a few months we will get a nice and stable release.