Monday, December 20, 2010

Bibble 5.2 Release Candidate and Holiday Discounts

This has been a pretty amazing year. We launched Bibble 5.0 almost exactly one year ago, added Perfectly Clear and Heal & Clone in version 5.1 in June, and are on the verge of releasing 5.2 with a whole host of new features and improvements. We've added no fewer than 60 RAW file formats since 5.0 launched, most of these in smaller releases between the "big" 5.x releases, and built and released our Bibble 5 RAW SDK to our technology partners.

So, with that said, I just wanted to quickly draw your attention to our release announcement for our Bibble 5.2 Release Candidate. This is probably the biggest update we've had since launching Bibble 5, and along with it we're offering a discount on both Bibble 5 Pro and Bibble 5 Lite.

After you take advantage of the discount vouchers, you can choose to download the "official" version of Bibble 5, which is 5.1.1, or you can decide to get the release candidate of 5.2. Your choice, and you can change your mind at any time.

Monday, November 22, 2010

Looking Forward to Bibble 5.2 - Part 2

Hi Guys,

Continuing from my earlier post, here's another set of features and updates we're working on for Bibble 5.2.

Copy Sets

Copy Sets can be a huge time-saver once you've figured out how to use them. The idea is to assign a hotkey, perhaps something like CTRL+1, to a group of settings, perhaps like Keywords, Ratings, Labels, and Tags. Then each time you press CTRL+1, the keywords, ratings, etc from the selected image will be copied to the clipboard. CTRL+V then pastes that to all selected images. In other words, you pre-select the stuff you want to copy frequently using a interface like the Selective Copy window, and save that to hotkeys. You can have lots of these, too, and that's where real workflow automation comes in by creating various Copy Sets for things like color correction, tonal control and other image adjustments, then other Copy Sets for various metadata options like copyright and photographer's contact info, or GPS info.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Looking Forward to Bibble 5.2

Hi Guys,

It's been a little while since our last post here, mainly because we've been hard at work on Bibble 5.2 and want to keep focused on that. But, I'd like to take a moment and share some of the exciting stuff we've been building into 5.2 just to get ya'll, well, excited.


Respect the Transform!
The one thing in previous versions of Bibble 5 that was editing-order dependent was creating regions: the "proper" way to work would be to straighten your horizon first (if needed) and THEN create regions to selective adjust image content. If you did things in the other order - regions first, then rotated the whole image a few degrees, well, the region would not rotate with the image content. Trouble! So, we've fixed that, and in the process allowed plugin developers to transform images all they want, and your regions will come along for the ride. The obvious example here is zPerspector which allows you to correct perspective distortion, remove keystoning and other geometric adjustments, with Bibble 5.2 and the up-coming new version of zPerspector, your regions will be transformed right along with your image content!



There are other enhancements to the Bibble Plugin SDK for version 5.2 that will allow our plugin developer community even more power and control when creating plugins. Some of them have had access to early Bibble 5.2 beta builds for several weeks, along with the new SDK. I expect some interesting stuff from them.


Crop Preferences
This sounds like a small thing, but it can really help out and allows you to not only create and manage cropping presets, but it also lets you configure various bits and pieces about how the crop tool looks and acts. You can control the opacity of the background of the crop tool, set how many grid lines to show inside the crop tool, and you can choose when to show the grid and crop frame: always, never, or only when moving or adjusting the crop.



There's also a lot of other features and updates aimed at improving usability and making the overall process of working with Bibble 5 easier and more fun. I'll go into a bit about these other bits and pieces in a future post...

Photo courtesy of Texas Photo Workshops

Also, just a quick update that the next Online Texas Photo Workshop on Bibble 5 is starting in one week. Sign up while space is still available.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Bibble 5.1.1 Update Released

We're happy to announce that Bibble 5.1.1 is now available. This release is primarily a camera support update to add support for the new cameras announced by Sony - the A33, A55 and A560. Also included is lens detection support for Sony and Panasonic cameras. Here are the finer details:
  • Added support for Sony a33, a55, a55V, a560.
  • Added support for Panasonic FZ40, FZ45, FZ100.
  • Added preliminary support for Canon 60D.
  • Added support for lens detection on Sony and Panasonic RAW files.
  • Fix issue causing crash when printing images with certain plugins applied.
Here at the labs we're committed to being among the first RAW converters to offer support for new cameras. If you've got a new toy we want you to be able to play with it right away. ;-)

Cheers

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

BIBBLE BASICS Workshop

Hi Folks,

Well, I'm happy to announce that Kevin Vandivier and Jeff Cicolani and just opened the doors to the BIBBLE BASICS workshop.

Jeff Cicolani spent quite a bit of time over here at the Labs, getting to know the ins and outs of Bibble 5 even better than he knew it before. It was really interesting for me to work with Kevin and Jeff in getting this put together, and I'm really excited about this new learning option for our customers.


Photo by Jeff Cicolano


This first workshop is designed to get you up and running with Bibble 5 quickly, making sure you are proficient at using the basics of Bibble 5. It a four-week, online workshop, meaning that anyone anywhere in the world can join in. An in-person version is planning as well, but that might still be a few months away. (Let us know in the comments if you'd be interested in an in-person workshop)

Monday, August 9, 2010

Bibble Training @ Texas Photo Workshops



As Bibble has grown in popularity over the years, we've had more and more customers wanting more and different learning options about our products. When Bibble 5 launched, we started out with a small set of tutorial videos, the on-line and PDF User Manual, FAQ's and of course our forums. But we've never had in-person training classes or dedicated, online workshops that will walk new users through the details of a photographic workflow using Bibble. Until now...

This summer, we've been working closely with the good folks at Texas Photo Workshops to put a workshop series together - and we're getting very close to launching it! Kevin Vandivier created the Texas Photo Workshops in 2008, after his time as the Photography Editor at Texas Highways Magazine (where he received numerous awards, including Honorable Mention for “Photo Editor of the Year” in the coveted Best of Photojournalism competition for 2009). For over 30 years, Kevin has traveled extensively throughout the U.S. and the world, covering assignments for Life, Newsweek, USA Today, National Geographic World & Adventure, Texas Monthly, Texas Highways and numerous other publications. His current workshops include his wildly popular Photographers Rehab, Masters of Light, and many others taught by Kevin and his partners. Here's how Kevin describes TPW:

Texas Photo Workshop was founded in 2008 by award winning photographer and photo editor Kevin Vandivier. TPW teaches excellence in photography by hiring A‐List photographers who have a proven track record as professional, award-winning photographers to teach our photography workshops. Both the online and in‐person workshops will advance your learning process by months, if not years. See what we offer at www.texasphotoworkshops.com.


We'll be starting out with a beginners workshop on the basics of a photographic workflow built around Bibble. Kevin and his team have put a huge amount of work into this first program, and I'm thrilled by the quality and quantity of information, and the easy, approachable style of his workshops. More details will follow about this as we get a bit closer to launch.


Here are a few of my favorite photos by Kevin:





Thursday, June 17, 2010

Sync Plugins and Presets across Multiple Computers

Here's a very useful trick that I've just started using. The idea is to use Dropbox to make sure plugins that you install on one computer auto-magically get installed on all machines that you use for Bibble.

First, a bit of background: Dropbox allows you to sync files and folders across several machines by storing a copy of items you want to sync in "the cloud". So, by sharing your "Plugins" and "Presets" folders on all the machines you use to run Bibble, you can be sure that they all look, feel, and perform the same. Install a plugin on any machine that you have setup to sync, and all other computers will get that plugin too! (note that you might need to restart Bibble on the other computers to get the new plugins to show up.)

This works on all systems that Dropbox supports, but requires NTFS on Windows.

Here's how:

Friday, May 21, 2010

Heal & Clone Teaser Video

Here's a quick look at what will be my starting point for our next official tutorial video for Bibble 5. It shows Bibble 5.1's new Heal & Clone tools in several different forms. Heal small specs to quickly remove dust or a wayward bird in the sky, clone out distracting elements, sensor dust, unwanted people from your images, and more. Take a quick look:


This is a bit longer that the final video, and there's no audio yet. Just a quick peek at what's to come regarding Healing & Cloning in Bibble 5.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Speed up the Human: Keyboard Layout

If you are using a more or less current computer chances are pretty high that Bibble is waiting for you most of the time and not the other way round. While one could drink unhealthy amounts of coffee or your favorite Austrian energy drink to speed up yourself, this might not the best idea on the long run.

In computer games you might collect power-ups, potions, health-packs or build your abilities along the way to become stronger-faster-better.

In Bibble we can assign keyboard shortcuts to almost anything. So without further ado i'll show you my current keyboard layout without any actual keys because the idea matters, not the actual assignment, even more so with all the different international keyboards we all are using and accustomed to.



How I arrived there and why it is set up this way. ...after the jump...

For those more comfortable with German might want to read this on my blog.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Come See Bibble 5.1 at the Austin Photo Expo

Austin Photo Expo

Come see Bibble 5.1 in action at Austin Photo Expo this weekend in our home town, Austin, Tx. We'll be having live demonstrations of the newest features in Bibble 5, including Perfectly Clear, and Healing and Cloning as well as general workflow demonstrations with Bibble 5.

I'm be hosting a few seminars on both Saturday and Sunday, and will be available for Q&A's both in our booth and in the seminars.

There will be tons of other great speakers there, and there's likely to be some great show specials as well, so come on down for the free show!

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Bibble 5 Box Art

As mentioned earlier on our Twitter feed, today we got our hands on the first Bibble 5 boxes to be printed. Here are a few pictures of the new boxes. They’re more compact and have a much cleaner design than the Bibble 4 boxes did and I think they really turned out great.

2010-04-21_20-23-19.jpg 2010-04-21_20-23-52.jpg
2010-04-21_20-26-39.jpg
2010-04-21_20-27-29.jpg

I’ve uploaded larger versions to my Flickr stream.

Cheers

Friday, April 9, 2010

Perfectly Clear Teaser

We've been hard at work on version 5.1, and one of the headline features we're going to be including in this (free) update is Perfectly Clear - the one-touch image optimization tool from our friends at Athentech. They have a great page explaining the image science behind their unique correction algorithms, so instead of going into that, let's just take a look at some before/after examples using Perfectly Clear inside Bibble in our latest development version of Bibble 5.1 Pro.

For all these shots, the only difference in the left (Bibble Default) images and the right (Perfectly Clear) is that for the image on the right, the Perfectly Clear adjustment was turned on - literally a single mouse click!

This first shot is a typical example of the results you can get out of Perfectly Clear in Bibble 5.1 with just one click. There is so much additional detail in the stones on the right of the doorway, and such an additional sense of depth to the scene.




Monday, April 5, 2010

New Plugin Directory

This weekend, we updated bits and pieces of our webpages, and added a new and much-needed Plugin Directory.

The directory (part of which is shown to the right) allows you to find the amazing work being done by the folks out there, creating cool new image adjustment tools for Bibble 5.

The directory allows you to sort by popularity, recent updates or with the newest plugins shown first. It also categorized the plugins to help you find the kinds of image adjustments you are looking for, and allows you to quickly see all the plugins created by a particular developer.

A major update to our plugin framework will be released with Bibble 5.1 which will allow for even more powerful and innovative plugins for Bibble 5 - so stay tuned as we get closer to the release of 5.1 for more info on these new plugins.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Cloning Teaser

Here's a quick teaser for one of the features coming in Bibble 5.1 - Cloning. We probably won't be answering any questions just yet and the UI may change. So for now just enjoy the eye candy.

Cloning Screenshot

And here's the end result:

Joshclops

Enjoy!

Plugin developer spotlight: Roger Barnes

This is the first of a (hopefully long) series of short interviews with Bibble Plugin developers. We will start with Roger Barnes (Mind Socket on the Bibble forums). His website can be found here.



Friday, March 19, 2010

Pixie, the antidote for pixel dust.

When I got my D300, the higher sensitivity (compared to the D200) was really nice for available light work and concert shots. But when I started pixel peeping, I quickly realized the noise characteristics for the new CMOS sensor led to fine pixel dust which is hard to get rid of with Noise Ninja. If I used enough noise reduction to get rid of the pixel dust, the image became pretty mushy.
So my choice was either to live with the pixel dust or forgo details in the image.

Thanks to Pixie, a free plugin from Barna Keresztes (http://www.kbarni.net) I no longer have to make that choice. I can have a reasonable amount of noise reduction and can get rid of the pixel dust on top.

In the example below, the left image has neither NN nor Pixie applied, the one in the middle shows NN (NN registered with a slight increase in the chroma noise reduction) and the one on the right NN plus Pixie. The difference might not be earth shattering, but it leads to much nicer prints.

100% view (click for a larger version):
200% view (click for a larger version):

Note, when working with Pixie, smaller adjustments will lead to a more aggressive noise removal.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Plugin Showcase: Andrea

One of the unique features of Bibble is our support of non-destructive image processing plugins. These aren’t Lightroom “plugins” which are really just external applications that are launched by Lightroom. I don’t know how anyone gets away with calling that a plugin. Nor are these Aperture plugins, which require the image to be rendered to an internal TIFF and then edited. Although Aperture plugins are actually plugins that run within Aperture, they’re actually not terribly different from the Lightroom experience. Aperture plugins are not non-destructive - the image has to first be rendered so you can’t go back and change white balance or exposure or other Aperture settings after you’ve edited an image with a plugin. Well, technically you can change settings after plugin editing but those changes are applied on top of the plugin edits. Another drawback to this approach (both for Lightroom and Aperture) is that it takes up a lot of extra disk space. When the image is rendered into a TIFF it will often take up a lot more space than the original file.

On the other hand, plugins in Bibble are completely non-destructive, don’t require the image to be rendered into an intermediate TIFF and run in real time just like any of the native Bibble filters. This is better in the following ways:

  • It’s a lot faster - rendering an image into a TIFF is slow.
  • It saves a lot of space - only plugin settings are saved since we’re not creating a duplicate image.
  • More powerful - plugins can run at almost any stage in our pipeline which gives plugin developers much more freedom to do some very interesting things.
Basically plugins in Bibble can do just about anything that native Bibble filters can do. They’re true first-class citizens.

Andrea

And that brings me to one of my favorite plugins - Andrea. Andrea is a film simulation plugin developed by Sean Puckett for both Black & White and Color films. If you’re familiar with Bibble 4 then you’d have known Andrea by its former name - Andy. What this plugin does is simulate “the exposure of film in a camera, plus optionally a second exposure of film in a darkroom.” Andrea is really the best tool you can find anywhere for creating B&W images. Well, at least I think it is. ;-) If you were a film shooter and had a favorite film or paper then you might find it in Andrea. The free version, which is actually included with Bibble 5, includes a number films and papers while the Pro version includes dozens more.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Brief Update from Bibble Labs....

Thanks to Dave, for setting this blog up! We've been really busy around here, as we usually are, but I'd like to take a quick moment to provide a quick update on the latest happenings around the Labs...

Bibble 5.0.3 will be released within the hour to our forums, which adds support for Canon's new 550D (also known as the EOS Rebel T2i or Kiss X4) and Olympus's new E-PL1. Both of these are very interesting cameras: Canon's new consumer dSLR with 1080p video and an 18 megapixel sensor that seems quite a bit like the 7D, and Olympus adds another Micro Four Thirds body, also aimed at consumers. Those Micro Four Thirds cameras are mighty tempting....

Anyway, I believe we are the first workflow application to add support for either of these cameras, and we at the Labs are thrilled to be able to get back in the habit of providing rapid support for new cameras. This is the third update to Bibble 5 since we launched right at the end of 2009, and we've added support for 30 new camera RAW formats in those 10 weeks!

We've also made great progress with 5.1 - this will be the most major upgrade for Bibble 5 yet. We're working with the fine folks at Athentech to implement and tune Perfectly Clear for Bibble 5, and Web Gallery output is back. These galleries are fairly simple, slightly upgraded from what Bibble 4 offered. Major upgrades to the plugin SDK are also evolving quickly: this will provide even more capabilities to our plugin developers so they can continue to expand on the functionality of Bibble 5.

... OK, that's enough for now..
Cheers, Jeff

Update

The Bibble 5.0.3 update and a list of changes can be found at the following links:

Bibble Downloads
Bibble 5 Change Log

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Welcome to the Bibble Blog

I’d just like to welcome everyone to the semi-official Bibble Blog. Why is it “semi-official” you ask? Well, mainly because not everything that you see here will be coming directly from us at Bibble Labs. We’ve enlisted some of our power users that are active in the community to help out with things here. So you’ll be hearing from both us at the labs about the things that we’re doing (as we have time) as well as from members of the Bibble community.

I hope that this will become a valuable resource for all users of Bibble 5. We want to show you how to take full advantage of all the features that Bibble offers so that you can get the most out of your images and do so as quickly as possible. Please feel free to share what you’ve learned about Bibble and let us know how you’re using it. If you’ve made you’re own tutorials or videos then feel free to let us know about them and we might feature them here on the blog.

Thanks for the continued support and happy Bibbling!