A free Linux version of the award-winning LightZone photo-editing software has been released yesterday.

Light Crafts, the producing company of LightZone, announced yesterday the availability of a beta release for the photo-editing software. With the help of this version, Linux users now have all the LightZone tools for editing and improving digital photos that Windows and Mac users have already had, including the ZoneMapper and Re-Light tools.

With LightZone, you can improve any photo regardless of camera type. It doesn't matter if you take a photo with a mobile phone, a point and click or a professional camera. The application is very intuitive, applies very fast changes and can eliminate some repeatable tasks, such as red eye or back lighting.

With ZoneMapper and Zone Tools, digital photographers can easily apply the ZoneSystem, developed by Ansel Adams in 1941, in order to produce photos with exceptional exposure and tonal ranges. The ZoneMapper Tool helps the users to find similar exposure areas within a photo, and the Zone Tool adjusts these tonal groups.

The LightZone Relight feature recaptures the High Dynamic Range (HDR) images a person saw when he/she took a photograph. LightZone doesn't require any special purpose camera settings or multiple exposures.

Fabio Riccardi, CEO, Light Crafts said: "The Linux release is our latest initiative to make LightZone available to as many users on as many operating systems as possible. Light Crafts serves a diverse Linux community consisting of many creative individuals who want the same high quality, robustness and powerful commercial photo-editing tools that are available for Windows and Mac users. With LightZone for Linux, we can provide even more photographers with easy-to-use and innovative software."

The new version, 3.3B Beta, was tested on popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Red Hat, Debian, etc. The tests will continue on other distros, too.

You can download LightZone right now from Softpedia!