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!