Last week I downloaded a trial copy of Bibble 4 to process some photos I took at a family get-together. After spending a little time studying the documentation, I went through over 400 images, selected the best 85, cropped, corrected, sharpened, and de-noised them. I then wrote the improved version of each of these 85 photographs to a different folder, leaving the originals intact. The whole process took about 2 hours.
If I had done this in Photoshop, PS Elements, or another editor, it would have taken considerably longer, and some of the results, like noise reduction, would not have been as good. If I were an experienced Bibble user, I suspect I could have done it twice as fast.
Bibble 4 is what is commonly referred to as workflow software, or RAW processing software, although you can still use it if you shoot JPG instead of RAW. Professionals are increasingly adopting workflow software. But I would argue that workflow software is just as useful to busy amateurs and family shooters as it is to professionals. If you can find workflow software that will let you make every adjustment you want without having to use an image editor such as Photoshop, and easily cull the undesirables, then it would make sense to forget about the editing software and use the workflow software most of the time.
Adobe’s Lightroom is the market leader in workflow software at the moment. Apple’s Aperture is a popular Mac-only product. And then there are a few lesser know players like Bibble 4. Unlike Lightroom and Aperture, Bibble offers a lower-cost version for folks that don’t need the more advanced features. Lightroom will set you back $300, Aperture – $200, and Bibble, for now, is $170 for the full version and $90 for the lite version.
Bibble is soon to release Bibble version 5. The full version of Bibble 5 has been set at $200, but the lite version is still an unknown. If the lite version of Bibble is proportionately priced, and includes a reasonable feature set, then amateurs who shoot only in JPG have can really benefit from such a product.
Here’s the rub: Bibble 4 does not offer a way to remove red-eye. Photographers that are picky enough to shoot RAW, whether professional or amateur, don’t generally end up with photos that have red-eye in the first place. But point-and-shooters do. To have to use an image editor just to get rid of the red-eye almost defeats the purpose of using workflow software in the first place.
But hope is alive with Bibble 5. Bibble 5’s selective editing may let you zap the red-eye, but we’ll have to wait to find out if and how it works. If it is easy to get the red out, and if a reasonably featured lite version is made available, then Bibble, which is already well-respected among professionals and advanced amateurs, could become a favorite of point-and-shooters as well.
Link: Â Bibble Labs
Leave a Reply