Sat, 11 Feb 2012 08:48:31 -0800WeeblyMon, 23 Jan 2012 16:38:37 -0800http://www.kbarni.net/1/post/2012/01/aftershot-pro-bis.htmlJust a quick update: Four plugins are almost ready for ASP, they are being tested in the Bibble support forums. If you are curious (and ready to encounter some bugs), go there and test them.
These plugins are: Equalizer, Vigne, Zone and Grid. ]]>Tue, 10 Jan 2012 06:26:27 -0800http://www.kbarni.net/1/post/2012/01/aftershotpro.htmlWell, this is the big news: Bibble became Corel AfterShot Pro!

I hope this will be a new beginning for my favourite RAW developer, and I hope it will have the success it deserves. This should motivate Corel to invest even more in this new product, for more features, more regular updates, and listening for user feedback.
I think the team badly needs a few more developers.
AfterShot could push Corel to port PaintShop Pro to Linux, too - the operating system badly needs a performant bitmap editor. Gimp is almost a decade behind Photoshop considering its features.

Now about my plugins
The good news is that AfterShot Pro has the same great plugin architecture as Bibble - with even more flexibility!

Right now I'm upgrading my plugins to the new SDK, to be able to take advantage of the new features. I hope I'll be able to release them during the next month.
Note that Pixie and Blacky are now part of AfterShot Pro core. You can find both in the Standard tab as Raw noise removal and Blacks.
Harry, Sally and Vigne and Zone should be the first plugins to be updated, followed by SallyPro. 
iNDA will be discontinued, and Lay will be dropped untill the SDK will support the changing of the alpha channel.

...and new plugins will come shortly!

The Bibble plugins on this page will not work on AfterShot Pro. So please don't buy my plugins for AfterShot Pro, I won't support them. (I have enough work with porting the plugins right now)
Please wait for the new plugins to be released! ]]>Fri, 24 Dec 2010 07:30:10 -0800http://www.kbarni.net/1/post/2010/12/vigne-updated-for-bibble-52.htmlA nice Christmas present, get it now from the download page!


Changelist:

• Bugfix: Batch processing of cropped images should work now
  
• SDK change: cropping adapted to Bibble 5.2.
  
• Preview button (Pro only): previews the vignetting on a neutral background
  
• Preserve colors: When used with positive vignetting (Strength>0), it will try to keep the colors (instead of adding a white border).
  
• Autosize: Sets the vignette size so that the transition ends at the edge of the image.
  

Merry Christmas and Happy Holydays!
]]>Thu, 09 Dec 2010 03:07:51 -0800http://www.kbarni.net/1/post/2010/12/vigne-update-coming.htmlWow... I've been avay for a long time.
I don't really have a good excuse, but now, as a full-time employee I had less time to play with Bibble. The other reason is, that my Olympus camera broke down, and I just got my new Nikon D7000. I had the chance to test it with the latest Bibble 5.2 beta, and I like its results more than those of Lightroom 3.3. Or even the in-camera conversions. (this is when I start to appreciate the excellent color rendering of the Olympus JPEG engine)
Anyway, for a few months I was using a Panasonic compact cam, so I didn't open Bibble for a while (Picasa was perfect to handle those JPG files).


Anyway, back to Vigne: I made two giant bugs in the current release, and I'm ironing it out right now. So expect a bugfix update this week, followed by a bigger update, with a few new features. 
I know these bugs were signaled since the original release, so I want to apologize because the update took so long.]]>Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:26:31 -0800http://www.kbarni.net/1/post/2010/06/one-more-update.htmlSorry, the first update didn't go as smoothly as I expected. Vigne and the registered versions of Harry and Sally were incorrectly packaged. It seems that the plugin packager provided by Bibblelabs has still some bugs.
The problem can be solved manually by editing the blxml file in the plugin folder (replace the H:/..... with lib/...) or you can redownload the plugins; the current versions should work (you may have to manually delete the old plugins)
Sorry again!
]]>Wed, 09 Jun 2010 05:10:37 -0800http://www.kbarni.net/1/post/2010/06/plugins-updated-for-bibble-51.htmlThe release of Bibble 5.1 is imminent, so I'm slowly updating my plugins for thus new version.
Now the plugins will come in a single file, which makes it easier to download and install them. Just drag the downloaded file in the Bibble 5.1 window, and restart Bibble! You can install it from the File menu, too (Install plugin).


I've already sent out the updated versions for the registered users by mail, so if you didn't receive it yet, don't hesitate to contact me!

Don't have Bibble 5.1 yet? Go here and grab the RC1 version here: http://support.bibblelabs.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=17189

PS. One more thing, from BibbleLabs: "There's no uninstaller (yet) that you can run within Bibble. All you need to do to uninstall a plugin is remove it from the "plugins" folder within your Bibble User Folder. The Bibble User Folder can be found in the System Info dialog in the Help menu."]]>Wed, 12 May 2010 16:38:35 -0800http://www.kbarni.net/1/post/2010/05/blacky-online-and-sallypro-updated.htmlAt 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!
]]>Wed, 05 May 2010 19:45:48 -0800http://www.kbarni.net/1/post/2010/05/darktable.htmlA 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.
]]>Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:12:40 -0800http://www.kbarni.net/1/post/2010/04/photography-and-linux.htmlThis is a question I ask myself often: what are the choices of a photographer using Linux?
I'm an amateur photographer, and I don't make lot of pictures; I shoot mostly JPEG and sometimes RAW; and I never print my pictures.
I need a simple cataloging application to manage my personal photos. Gnome and KDE come with their own software, F-Spot and DigiKam. I heard that DigiKam is more complete with more options, but I use Gnome. So I stayed with a proprietary - but cross-platform application, Picasa. It just works well for me, I was using it for many years under Windows (before it was bought by Google).
For RAW development I don't really need cataloging, but I like to be able to work with all my photos in the same time. And I like to have all the basic editing options in the software. Fortunately there are several great programs for this; I'm using Bibble5, and RawTherapee is also a great choice (waiting for version 3). UFRaw is a good alternative to ACR, and there are other excelent RAW developers, too.
Now here's the problem: what to use for photo/image editing? Generally there are a lots of programs to do anything in Linux (at least 5-6 great video editors, and more to come), but in this field the only possibility is Gimp. And it doesn't even compare with an old Photoshop yet. I'm really missing the adjustment layers, layer effects and easily adjustable brushes, it supports only 8bpp RGB, etc. And next version will be released next year. Alternatives? Cinepaint (it's even more basic), Pixel (expensive vapourware) or TuxPaint (for kids under 5). Photoshop with Wine? Why didn't anybody else try to write a good photo editor? Finally Gimp is useable, but why aren't there any alternatives? And none of the good commercial applications are ported to Linux...
So, what's your suggestion? What are you using? Any good ideas? Write your answer in the comments!
]]>Fri, 16 Apr 2010 02:54:51 -0800http://www.kbarni.net/1/post/2010/04/sallypro-15-released.htmlThis new version implements the Preview and Reset buttons in the SallyPro interface, and fixes some bugs. The interface had a facelift too, it's more intuitive now.

Note that the buttons work only in the registered version, they are deleted from the interface of the trial version. Otherwise the trial version is fully functional (and it should be updated if you are using it, because there are some bugs I fixed).

BTW, no Mac version right now, the Macbook I used to compile my plugins just died and it's been sent for repairs.
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