BIBBLE PRESS RELEASE: Sept 26, 2006 "Bibble Labs Releases version 4.9 with Clone / Spot Healing tool, sensor defect correction and image rating.

This follows the June 2006 announcement of 4.8 with Advanced Lens Correction and B&W / Spot Color Plugin Other improvements include Fujifilm S3 Pro support and a Mac Universal Binary. AUSTIN TX - Bibble Labs, Inc. today announces the general availability of Bibble Pro and Bibble Lite Upgrade 4.8. This free upgrade is available to existing Bibble 4 license holders, and represents the third such major upgrade of 2006. New features in this release include a redesigned and more powerful Lens Correction tool enabling correction of barrel and pin-cushion distortion, as well as chromatic aberration and vignetting. A new plugin is also distributed with the application to allow robust Black and White conversion, including an innovative Spot Color feature. “With this plugin, users can create Black and White images quickly, controlling which color channels affect the B&W value, with much more granularity than simple desaturation. This plugin also works in conjunction with our powerful color manipulation tools, providing complete control over the B&W conversion process,” says Eric Hyman, president and CEO of Bibble Labs. “Further, our novel Spot Color feature within the plugin allows for creative effects not available in any other RAW Workflow tool.”

4.9 is the 4th major update to Bibble just this year. Bibble is updated and tuned up more often than any of the other RAW converters in this article. Bibble is trying hard to win your hearts and minds! Bibble's tool array is second to none in this group of RAW converters. The interface is intuitive and easy to use. You work from one GUI with user selectable floating tool windows or you can choose a layout with a  very efficient tabbed tool interface. Bibble's image adjustment tools have both sliders and numeric inputs.

Bibble's file browser currently supports RAW and JPEG image files. The browser has the usual copy/paste drag and drop file management features. You can open and work with images from a thumbnail browser interface or you can just browse to your image from a file/open command. You can click and drag within the Sharpen/Noise preview window and a small floating view frame opens on the main preview image. You can then drag that small window to view any part of the image at magnifications from 100 to 400% in the Sharpen/Noise preview window. The main image preview window can be be viewed at preset increments between 'fit in window' to 800% magnification.

The new combo healing and patch (clone) tool in Bibble 4.9 has excellent adjustable parameters. This tool operates a little differently than most basic 'clone' tools. Because it is so 'tunable' I highly recommend watching the short Quick Time movie on using this tool that is available on Bibble's web site.

Bibble has a very interesting selective B&W conversion tool. I'll admit to having very little experience with B&W conversions. However, this very full featured tool would be a lot easier for those of us with limited skills in that area if it had a color picker as well as the very efficient color wheel that is supplied as the tool's main adjustment feature.

The inclusion of Noise Ninja® as an integrated plugin was a thoughtful addition to Bibble's tool chest. Noise Ninja is one of the best aftermarket digital noise reduction tools available today. If you tune up your RAW conversion skills to take advantage of all the power Bibble now offers, you'd seldom, if ever, need a high powered image editing program for image corrections.

You should know that Noise Ninja is available in Bibble in two forms. If you do not own a license for Noise Ninja (don't already have it installed), the default Noise Ninja interface available in Bibble Pro and Bibble Lite is a basic two slider adjustment for 'strength' and 'smoothness'. See image below

If you are using Bibble Pro and buy a license for Noise Ninja from Picture Code or already have Noise Ninja installed on your computer, the following tools will also be available in the Bibble Pro tool set. See image below

Personally, I think the unlicensed Noise Ninja tools are good enough for most images up to ISO 1600. In most cases the unlicensed Noise Ninja plugin seems to do a slightly better job than most of the rest of the RAW converter's noise reduction tools. However, if you want the power of the full version of Noise Ninja, you'll have to buy a license. I do think that having USM done in conjunction with noise reduction is much better than doing them separately. You can accomplish this with the licensed version of this plugin. RAW conversion times are significantly increased when you run Noise Ninja and USM. However, for shooters who are frequently using high ISO speeds I'd highly recommend the licensed version of the Noise Ninja plugin. Naturally, if you buy a Noise Ninja license you can download and install, depending on the type of license you purchase, one or both of the full versions of Noise Ninja. Noise Ninja is available as a Photoshop compatible plugin and a standalone application.

Bibble has an automatic image correction tool plugin called Perfectly Clear®. This tool is basically an auto levels and auto color tint correction tool. While I'm not usually a fan of 'auto' image adjust tools, if you are not comfortable with a levels or curves tool and occasionally have problems with color balance or hue you might find this tool to be useful. Like all auto adjustments Perfectly Clear frequently adjusts the image perfectly and sometimes doesn't do so well. Perfectly Clear seems to be a bit 'smarter' then most of the other 'auto adjust' tools I've used. More often than not, it does a very nice job. All in all, it is a nice inclusion in Bibble's toolset for those images that you are having trouble with getting 'just right'. Perfectly Clear has adjustable parameters for the color tint correction applied from 'max tint' to 'tint off'.

Bibble's implementation of its 'Vibrancy' tool is nicely done. If you are looking for the 'Velvia' look with bold color saturation, Bibble's Vibrancy tool is going to get you close nearly every time. The Vibrancy tool has a plus and minus adjustment range so you can reduce the saturation also. The press release says "for selective enhancement of image saturation or pop". In this case 'selective' is referring to the color math used by the tool to accomplish its goals. There are no user selectable parameters for this tool.

Bibble has a very clever highlight recovery tool that actually works quite well on images that need to have the highlights toned down or brought back into color range. You can apply separate image adjustments to RAW images and then send them to a batch queue. Bibble is capable of batch processing in the background. Bibble's batch processing can be configured to save multiple image output file types and sizes. As an example, you want a full resolution 16 bit TIFF for printing and web images at full page and thumbnail. Bibble can output all of these images in one batch operation. You cannot individually name files in a batch operation unless you are willing to rename the original RAW file. Bibble has an image setting copy/paste feature that allow you to apply some or all of your current image adjustments to any other image or selected group of images.

Bibble has excellent color management features including color managed printing capabilities. Printing capabilities include pre-set print sizes, user configurable print sizes and contacts sheets. Bibble has many other tools for customizing, organizing and executing a professional level RAW conversion workflow. Bibble keeps track of adjustments you make to any given RAW image. When you open a RAW file that you previously worked on, all tool settings are set to where they were when you last worked on that RAW image.

Bibble's lens correction tool includes distortion profiles for many manufacturer's cameras and lenses. Cameras and lenses will be added to this list as they become available. The camera and lens specific distortion profiles fix common lens perspective issues like barrel and pincushion distortion. Also included in the lens correction tool group is a tool to correct chromatic aberration and a vignette control tool. The vignette tool can be used to add or subtract vignette effect. This is useful with wide angle lenses that may have light fall off toward the corners of the image.

Bibble uses an image and settings cache to save image previews and adjustment settings. The following is an explanation of Bibble's image cache from Bibble's documentation:

"Bibble saves your current application settings in a cache so that it is convenient to open the application and continue your work without having to reset or reconfigure the application preferences. The cache is also used to store temporary files that the application uses to track edits and process images."

Bibble is the king of the hill with speed of RAW conversions. Bibble took only 6 seconds for a Canon 20D RAW file and 9 seconds for a Canon 1Ds Mark II RAW (file saved to 16 bit TIFF). Bibble no longer automatically makes a full preview image for each thumbnail as soon as you open a folder in Bibble. You can select in preferences to either fully process the preview image in the background or just have the thumbnails for each image generated. If you select to not have the preview image fully processed, the preview image is made when you select an image from the thumbnails to work on. There's a slightly longer delay to see a preview image when they aren't background processed but I much prefer this new approach to the previous method where generation of preview images for every image in the folder was automatic and was started as soon as the folder was opened in the program. On average I only want to view 10 to 20 images in any given folder. In my opinion background preview image generation is a resource hog for disk drive space and slows up the RAW converter's response to accessing images or tools during the time that image preview generation is working in the background. Bibble has very good searchable help documentation.

Bibble at 4.9 is very stable on my PC platform. My only complaint with Bibble is the highlight recovery tool leans too heavily toward recovering color. You may see unwanted color shifts in what you thought would be fairly neutral highlights. Bibble has the best tool box and selection of specialty tools available in a RAW converter. The advantages of doing advanced capability specialty manipulations like noise reduction, lens distortion and black & white conversion at the high bit color level of RAW should not be overlooked.

To see a features comparison between Bibble Pro and Bibble Lite click here. To see a supported camera list and system requirements, click here

Bibble 4.9
 GUI (Graphical User Interface) shown configured as a very clean tabbed tool set

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