Help and support
Can you become a pro user easily?
Some time ago Lightzone insisted on users registering their data on the website before obtaining permission to download the application. This is no longer an obligatory step, but we understand that it was a way to motivate users to participate at the Lightzone forums. But even without any registration it’s possible to view annotated screenshots, watch videos and consult tutorials in PDF from the Lightzone website.
Of course, for novice users the most useful materials are those step-by-step guides where you can instantly see which settings lead to certain results. It’s particularly surprising given the fact that Lightzone has a dramatically smaller user base than Gimp. You can find quickly help for Gimp online, including videos recorded and shared on Youtube by enthusiasts.
Both Rawtherapee and Darktable have superb online documentation of all sorts, including freely available PDF books (Rawpedia and Digital Photo Development with Darktable, respectively), and it’s hard to tell which community is larger. The problem, though, is that a RAW file isn’t easy to edit, and both Rawtherapee and Darktable gives you a hundred ways to make it worse. For instance, while the noise reduction tools are incredible, in the wrong hands they end up fighting each other. We recommend that you consult a handbook before doing anything.
That sort of things can be a challenge when working with Gimp. On one hand, there are numerous tutorials and baby steps for carrying out simple editing in Gimp, but high-profile tasks like denoising are only covered in a range of short articles, and require you to conduct trial-and-error experiments. That’s why we recommend splitting tasks between Gimp and a RAW editor (with which Gimp can possibly integrate).
Predictably, Pixeluvo has less to offer, although there are still some useful sources of help. As a commercial product, Pixeluvo simply has to offer some support, including training materials and documents. The available amount is limited and mainly lives at the main web site (pixeluvo.com). We can’t blame the developer for that because Pixeluvo isn’t a popular product. The official Pixeluvo forum isn’t very lively either, though…