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.