"Like Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom, LightZone belongs to a new breed of application designed specifically for serious photographers and the RAW-formatted images they typically use. These programs don't try to match the all-encompassing multitasking of Adobe Photoshop. Instead, they deliver a handful of the editing tools that photographers are most likely to need. LightZone, inspired by the "zone" system of photography developed by Ansel Adams, focuses on remapping tonal values to optimize an image's highlights and shadows."Being a newbie in the world of RAW, I'm comfortable for now with Adobe Camera RAW and Photoshop Elements for processing my RAW images, but if you're looking for something more serious, LightZone looks worthy of consideration. It has some unique features, and if purchased by June 30th, you get lifetime free upgrades.