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.

Bibble 5.1.1 Update Released

We're happy to announce that Bibble 5.1.1 is now available. This release is primarily a camera support update to add support for the new cameras announced by Sony - the A33, A55 and A560. Also included is lens detection support for Sony and Panasonic cameras. Here are the finer details:

• Added support for Sony a33, a55, a55V, a560.
• Added support for Panasonic FZ40, FZ45, FZ100.
• Added preliminary support for Canon 60D.
• Added support for lens detection on Sony and Panasonic RAW files.
• Fix issue causing crash when printing images with certain plugins applied.

Here at the labs we're committed to being among the first RAW converters to offer support for new cameras. If you've got a new toy we want you to be able to play with it right away. ;-)

Cheers

Bibble Labs Download Center

BIBBLE BASICS Workshop

Hi Folks,

Well, I'm happy to announce that Kevin Vandivier and Jeff Cicolani and just opened the doors to the BIBBLE BASICS workshop.

Jeff Cicolani spent quite a bit of time over here at the Labs, getting to know the ins and outs of Bibble 5 even better than he knew it before. It was really interesting for me to work with Kevin and Jeff in getting this put together, and I'm really excited about this new learning option for our customers.

Photo by Jeff Cicolano

This first workshop is designed to get you up and running with Bibble 5 quickly, making sure you are proficient at using the basics of Bibble 5. It a four-week, online workshop, meaning that anyone anywhere in the world can join in. An in-person version is planning as well, but that might still be a few months away. (Let us know in the comments if you'd be interested in an in-person workshop)

Bibble Training @ Texas Photo Workshops

As Bibble has grown in popularity over the years, we've had more and more customers wanting more and different learning options about our products. When Bibble 5 launched, we started out with a small set of tutorial videos, the on-line and PDF User Manual, FAQ's and of course our forums. But we've never had in-person training classes or dedicated, online workshops that will walk new users through the details of a photographic workflow using Bibble. Until now...

This summer, we've been working closely with the good folks at Texas Photo Workshops to put a workshop series together - and we're getting very close to launching it! Kevin Vandivier created the Texas Photo Workshops in 2008, after his time as the Photography Editor at Texas Highways Magazine (where he received numerous awards, including Honorable Mention for “Photo Editor of the Year” in the coveted Best of Photojournalism competition for 2009). For over 30 years, Kevin has traveled extensively throughout the U.S. and the world, covering assignments for Life, Newsweek, USA Today, National Geographic World & Adventure, Texas Monthly, Texas Highways and numerous other publications. His current workshops include his wildly popular Photographers Rehab, Masters of Light, and many others taught by Kevin and his partners. Here's how Kevin describes TPW:

Texas Photo Workshop was founded in 2008 by award winning photographer and photo editor Kevin Vandivier. TPW teaches excellence in photography by hiring A‐List photographers who have a proven track record as professional, award-winning photographers to teach our photography workshops. Both the online and in‐person workshops will advance your learning process by months, if not years. See what we offer at www.texasphotoworkshops.com.

We'll be starting out with a beginners workshop on the basics of a photographic workflow built around Bibble. Kevin and his team have put a huge amount of work into this first program, and I'm thrilled by the quality and quantity of information, and the easy, approachable style of his workshops. More details will follow about this as we get a bit closer to launch.


Here are a few of my favorite photos by Kevin:

Sync Plugins and Presets across Multiple Computers

Here's a very useful trick that I've just started using. The idea is to use Dropbox to make sure plugins that you install on one computer auto-magically get installed on all machines that you use for Bibble.

First, a bit of background: Dropbox allows you to sync files and folders across several machines by storing a copy of items you want to sync in "the cloud". So, by sharing your "Plugins" and "Presets" folders on all the machines you use to run Bibble, you can be sure that they all look, feel, and perform the same. Install a plugin on any machine that you have setup to sync, and all other computers will get that plugin too! (note that you might need to restart Bibble on the other computers to get the new plugins to show up.)

This works on all systems that Dropbox supports, but requires NTFS on Windows.

Here's how: