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.