Zones

Reading the distribution

The 0–X labels run from black through middle gray (V) to white. The eleven bands use CIE L* centers at 0, 10, …, 100. Boundaries lie halfway between the centers; a value on a boundary belongs to the lighter band. Every pixel in the selected region counts, with no blending from previously selected regions.

Each bar reports a percentage of the region. Zones discards horizontal image position; use Luma Waveform to locate tones from left to right. Hover a band to read its name and exact share.

The familiar Zone System notation is a tonal-placement aid for rendered images. Adjacent bands are not one-stop exposure intervals, and the result does not reconstruct the original scene or film development. Bands 0 and X include near-black and near-white tones; their presence alone does not prove clipping.

Controls

On desktop, Z shows Zones by itself and Shift+Z adds or removes it from the current layout. The browser Lab provides manual scope selection.

Auto orientation follows the pane’s shape: dark to light runs left to right in a wide pane and bottom to top in a tall one. Choose Horizontal or Vertical to fix the direction. A thin gold cursor line locates the sampled tone on that scale, independently of the bar’s height. Compact panes show fewer labels; hovering still identifies every band.

Desktop HDR bands

With the global HDR setting enabled, Zones retains 0–X through SDR white and adds amber bands up to +1, +2, +3 and +4 stops, followed by an overflow band above +4. Each stop doubles linear luminance. All bands share one denominator; invalid luminance samples are excluded and flagged. An SDR-only capture is identified explicitly.

HDR and saved layout presets are desktop-only. The Lab keeps local photos, manual layouts and the current view between visits, without these features.