Professional Photo Editing With Bibble 5 Pro

Four photos being adjusted in the main workspace of Bibble 5 Pro, from Bibble Labs. The professional photo editing application allows users to work with up to four images at once. (Joshua Philipp/The Epoch Times)

The professional photographer community has long held Bibble Labs in high esteem. Bibble specializes in one photo editing application, which works magic with photos and has had fans waiting since over 3 years for a new release.

The application was originally announced at photography trade fair Photokina in 2006 and was expected to be released last year, but Bibble 5 Pro wasn’t available until recently. Good news though—the wait was worth it.

Bibble, which brands itself as “Photographic Workflow at the Speed of Light,” has become even faster in its latest release. It also offers selective editing, more tools, and full utilization of multi-core computers.

Speed Test

Speed is what makes this application shine. Bibble 5 Pro boasts it is up to 88 times faster than similar applications. Bibble 4 was supposedly the fastest RAW file converter on the market, and Bibble 5 surpasses Bibble 4 on every computer it was tested on, according to Bibble Labs.

The company also claims Bibble 5 running on a computer with a single CPU is as fast as the next fastest application running with four CPUs. Most other applications apparently hit their limit at four CPUs and anything higher will not make much difference in their workflow, Bibble on the other hand will keep using the processing power of any number of CPUs.

I decided to put these claims to the test. I used 18 RAW image files from a 10.2 megapixel Nikon D200 to compare Bibble’s speed to Adobe Lightroom 2.

Bibble was almost four times as fast when importing images. It took 19 seconds for Lightroom 2 to import all the images. Bibble 5 Pro imported the same images in 5 seconds.

For exporting 100 percent size JPEG files, Lightroom 2 took 110 seconds to export all 18 files, while Bibble 5 Pro took 108 seconds. A closer examination, however, revealed that while Lightroom exported 5.1 MB images, Bibble 5 Pro exported 12.1 MB images which were more than twice as large, and it did it in around the same time. It seems that Bibble’s claims to fame are true.

Apparently, the key to speed is that Bibble uses all of the computing power available from multi-core computers. It uses 99 percent to 100 percent of the CPU’s power as opposed to other applications which use a much smaller percentage.

The editing features of the application are just as fast. When switching between images there is almost no load time. When displaying large image files, I’ve come to expect a certain amount of wait time with every photo editing application I’ve ever used, so Bibble’s speed came as a bit of a shock. Even when holding an arrow key, scrolling through images quickly, it still displays images in their final form almost instantly.

Adjustments also appear quickly, without much in terms of loading. Long load times were among my main complaints with Nikon Capture NX2. They make it difficult to work quickly, and make you cringe at the idea of doing several adjustments. In Bibble 5, even when editing multiple photos simultaneously, it is very fast.

Editing in Layers

The addition of layers brings a lot of options to Bibble 5 Pro. It helps when making edits to specific areas, changing the color, or changing a specific object in a photograph.

The application comes with four tools for selecting parts, including one that works like a paint brush, where you just paint over the part you want to work with. Others tools work like a vector pen, in which you draw in specific points.

I found two of the tools a bit difficult to use while the others were quite easy. Since they all accomplish the same tasks in different ways, it really comes down to preference—choosing the tool that works best for each user.

I worked with a very poorly taken image I took at a friend’s wedding. Part of the image is badly blown out, with a heavy white, while the rest is very dark. Using a combination of the selection tools I was able to darken the blown out parts in the image and lighten the rest.

This can also be used to drain saturation from a specific area, turning select parts of an image black and white. This feature is often used by art photographers to make flowers the only colored part of a photo, and so on.

As for editing in general, Bibble 5 Pro does a fair job. All of the edits are nondestructive, so they do not affect the original image. All of the essentials are there for correcting light, color, and sharpening images. There are also several presets that come in handy.

Bibble 5 Pro also has a very precise lens correction. Built into the application is a massive library of different camera models and lenses. It will automatically detect this from the image’s metadata and then apply the necessary changes to the image. It can also be done manually.

The straightening tool, which rotates the image, is so-so, as it is a simple sliding bar that rotates the image. While it works well, it would have been helpful to have a grid guide to see whether individual lines in the image are straight.

I would have also liked to see a clarity adjustment tool like that found in Lightroom, which increases the intensity of details in the image.

Noise Ninja

Bibble 5 Pro has Noise Ninja built into it, which is wonderful. The application can turn sand to water—in a figure of speech. It can take images that are grainy to the point of being almost unusable and turn them into smooth pictures. This is helpful, especially when taking photographs in low light.

For example, when a camera’s ISO (sensitivity of the film or sensor) settings are too high, the images will look grainy. Some cameras compensate for low-lighting by automatically increasing their ISO, which can ruin otherwise great images. Noise Ninja can fix this to some degree.

There are also downsides to Noise Ninja though. If overused it makes images have a painterly look to them, so it should be used sparingly.

Bibble 5 Pro also has a panel devoted to plugins, which makes them seem as if they were a regular part of the application.

Another interesting feature in Bibble is the ability to have four images opened in the workspace at once. Photoshop users may laugh, but the Bibble workspace is much closer to that of Lightroom or Capture One, so this is nice to see. This feature can be useful when comparing different images.

There are also several ways to search through images. A user can add keywords to individual images, rate them, and search through photo catalogues or from regular system files. Multiple search options can be applied to help refine a search.

There is even an option to search for photographs according to the camera settings they were taken with or according to the camera model.

In a Nutshell

Bibble 5 Pro, like other leading professional photo editing applications, gets the job done and does it well. Each photo editing application has its perks and weaknesses, however. Fans of any one application will find that when moving to others, there always seems to be both something missing and something gained.

The best feature in Bibble is its fast image processing. It is fair to say that this is probably the fastest professional photo editing application on the market. For users who work with large amounts of images and large file sizes, that alone could make it worthwhile. The addition of Noise Ninja and the ability to use layers are also great perks.

For light and color adjustment, Bibble gets the job done well, but other applications such as Lightroom 2 and Nikon Capture NX2 offer a bit more in terms of tools.

Price: $199.95
Web site: www.bibblelabs.com

[etRating value=“ 4.5”]