At last, the work of my last weeks is online.
First, here is my latest plugin, Blacky. It is a blacks slider (I mean two blacks sliders). The first is a more subtle adjustment, I recommend to use that tool for a nice effect. The second slider is a black level adjustment.
Both effects can be achieved with the curves tool, but maybe a dedicated control is easier to use. Maybe that's why this feature was asked several times in the Bibble support forums.
And before I forget: Blacky is opensource, so if you want to modify it, just get the source code!

The second news is that SallyPro got updated. This fixes finally the crash on Mac when the plugin got enabled. I'd like to apologise that the previous versions of SallyPro didn't work on this platform. Sincerely I don't own a Mac and I just compiled the sources which worked for Windows and Linux for Mac. But, well, they didn't work as expected.
Big thanks for RobiWan for his help and his time to find this bug!
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Darktable 05/05/2010
 
A followup for the previous post about Linux and photography.
I still didn't find the perfect image editor for Linux (I think it simply doesn't exist - yet), but I discovered a new and relatively unknown RAW developer which simply left me WOW!
I'm speaking about Darktable.
It's interface ressembles a lot to Lightroom (it uses cataloging, and the panels are placed the same way), and the customizability of the tools simply blew me away. Just take a look at the Color Zones tool. It's one of the most intuitive and userfriendly - and in the meantime the most complex color equalizer I've seen. I also liked the sliders: they aren't really sliders, just draggable rectangles - but very easy to use. You have to try it. The navigation through the catalogue is a surprize, too.
It's got color managed workflow, customizable demosaicing, lens corrections, batch processing, metadata and keyword manager and everything you need.
The icing on the cake is that it's expandable with really flexible plugins and - of course - it's completely opensource.
Now the bad part: while it's stuffed with shiny controls, the plain and basic adjustments are hard to find: I'd like to have a tool with brightness, contrast, saturation, vibrance a.s.o. The crop and straighten tools could be much better. A nice local contrast tool would be nice, too. And it's sloooowww on my laptop (maybe it's better on newer computers).
I tested it only on a few images so I can't tell how does it fit on a professional workflow and how does it handle images from different cameras, but my first impressions are more than positive. Nice work, guys!

P.S. Back to Bibble: cookin' a new plugin: Blacky. Check out the beta version in the Bibble5 forums.
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Now the Mac plugins work with each architecture.
Time to celebrate!

After, I have some ugly bugs to fix...
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The most important: my webpage has a new address: www.kbarni.net
Be sure to upgrade your bookmarks. If you didn't bookmark this page yet, this is an excellent opportunity to do it :)

The second great news: Bibble 5.0.1 was released on thursday, with an impressive changelog! As the plugin API was changed, all the plugins have to be updated. Go quickly to the download page to get the latest versions!

I have a great news for Mac owners, too: finally my plugins are compiled for this platform, too. Unfortunately they are reported to work only on Intel based Macs. I'm working on making them work on PowerPC architectures, too.

The last news is about the release of a new plugin: Pixie. I'll write about it in the next post.
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First the good news: SallyPro for Bibble4 is released!
It wasn't easy to write it, the interface has more than 650 elements crowded in the tabs. Implement the action for every button, linking every slider was a real PITA. But it was worth the work, the results are really great.
I also made a double interface for SallyPro, you can use which suits you the best, or even both interfaces in parallel! You can find them in the Tools menu->Plugins->SallyPro A or SallyPro B.
You can try the preview version or buy it.

In the meantime I almost finished porting Harry and Sally to Bibble 5.
I hope I can post them for testing this weekend. As there still may be some (minor) changes in the Bibble5 plugin structure, it's possible I'll have to recompile them for the next beta (or the final version, I hope), but I think I won't wait for the final version with the release, so you can play with them (and maybe use them - sincerely I like a lot the features of Bibble5).

Now the bad news: I had a Mac today from a friend, si I had the chance to compile my plugins for MacOS. Sally works without problem, Harry gives aberrant results and SallyPro crashes. It's really annoying, as the "engine" of the plugins is the same, and they compile without problem under Linux and Windows.
I've spent 3 hours debugging, trying to correct an operation for Harry, but no luck. About SallyPro I don't have a clue what could go wrong.
So I'll put Sally on the download section, but I won't promise anything for SallyPro and Harry.

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