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.
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.
Editing in Andrea is fairly simple. Although it has a lot of options, most of what you need can be done by just flipping through the Camera Stock and Print Stock popups. Even if you never shot film (like myself) you can easily preview many different looks until you find something that you like. Usually just finding the right film and paper combination is enough for me, but you can also individually adjust the exposure for both the Camera (film) and Print (paper) if needed. Just play around until you get something that you like.
Here’s an example of what Andrea can do for your Black & White images:
Saturation = 0 |
Andrea - Kodak Imagelink HQ + Foma Fomaspeed Variant III |
But not only that, Andrea also works great for color images by applying the B&W response curves to each individual color channel for a full color image. "In this way, you can use the response characteristics of a B&W film for creating colour output." (Andrea homepage, Colour section):
Bibble Default |
Andrea - FujiFilm Neopan 100 + Foma Fomaspeed Variant III |
The one feature that I miss from Andy Pro is the Color slider. It was similar to the Color checkbox in Andrea but would allow you to adjust how much color you wanted to bring back. This allowed you to only bring back a little bit of color which I liked to use to give a vintage not-quite-B&W and not-quite-color look. So please Sean, bring that feature back to us. :-P
As I mentioned earlier the free version of Andrea is included in Bibble 5 since version 5.0.1 so you’ve likely already got it installed. Just click on the Plugins tab and start playing. The Pro version can be purchased from Sean’s website and you can even set your own price.
Also, there are a lot of very nice plugins being developed for Bibble. I hope that we can showcase some of the other plugins in future articles. For now you can check them out in the Bibble Plugin Forum.
Andrea Website
Larger images on Flickr
Plugin Forum
2 comments:
Great showcase, it has inspired me to give Andrea a proper look over, and Sean may even get a sale out of it!
Andy was my favorite plugin, I am so happy to see it's new incarnation as Andrea in Bibble 5. This was one of my pre-requisites to upgrading.
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