Bibble 5.2.3 Just Released

Hi Folks...

Well, it might have seemed a bit quiet around the forums and here in the blog, but that didn't mean we were slacking off.  Quite the contrary.  We've just posted the final version of Bibble 5.2.3  - and it includes a host of great improvements:

16 New Camera RAW formats
Some exciting new cameras have hit the shelves in the last couple months, and we're thrilled to be able to add support for so many of them.  I picked up a Olympus E-PM1 right when it came out - so of course we support it now :).  Many other mirrorless cameras are in our newly supported camera list - just take a look:

• Olympus E-P3, E-PL3, E-PM1, XZ-1
• Panasonic G3, GF1
• Leica V-LUX 2, D-LUX 5
• Nikon D5100, P7100, V1, J1
• Sony A-77, A-65, NEX-5N

Interesting: only three of those have mirrors at all - and of those, two are translucent!

Mirrors or not, all cameras will appreciate out new RAW Noise control:

This may look like a simple, little tool, but it packs quite a punch.  The "Impulse" part does a great job at automatically finding dead or hot pixels and quickly corrects them.  These are seen most in higher ISO shots and long exposures (several second), but on one of my older cameras, there are a couple stuck pixels that are apparent even at ISO 100.  This control is on by default, so you likely won't even notice - expect those pesky hot spots will mysteriously vanish.  The 'RAW Noise' portion of the control and Threshold sliders work together to smooth out the worst of the noise before demosaicing. This gives tools like Noise Ninja a much better starting point, so these  two controls work great together.

We've also added a 'Blacks' slider - a handy and quick way to deepen the darkest portions of a photo, and we've added an 'Edit in External Editor' command to let you quickly 'round trip' in your favorite pixel editor.

We've fixed loads of bugs, improved stability, memory management, and removed a couple conditions that could cause the application to hang on single CPU computers.  

In otherwords, we've added quite a bit.

There is more big news to come in early 2012.  But for now, just enjoy the FREE upgrade to Bibble 5, and have yourself a mirrorless holiday season!

Cheers, Jeff

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.

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 Preferences Tab

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.

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

Rule of Thirds lines and a dark background

Lines in quadrants and a light background

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.

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