Thursday, February 26, 2009

New Toy: A BibblePro Plugin :)

Sean Puckett is an independant developer of Bibble plugins. He makes a whole range of lovely plugins that really enhance Bibble's already considerable capabilities by a whole new level. I've collected a small bunch of them over the time I've used Bibble, and at 10 or 20 dollars each, they don't cost too much if you get one or two every few months. Hot favourites are his awesome black and white plugins, but I love his other plugins such as Ansel that gives the capability to adjust contrast by zone (hence the name, Ansel :))

I'm probably going to shoot the Volleyball SA finals competition soon, and the way I usually grade my images are NOT good for human skin tones. (It's good for Dingoes, but I digress). Gina is one plugin that will sort me out. The free version (Yes, lots of Sean's plugins are free... and work very, very well) already fixes up the images the way I want very quickly - especially since I'm NOT into portraiture. But I thought getting the pro version would be cool to support independant developers, plus, there's probably some nifty extra features.

Example one: Provia curve applied, and saturation *immensely* boosted. Gives loads of punch, but for people. Hmm. Kinda sunburnt.


Gina is able to magically target skin tones and perform some tweaks to them.



It's not always perfect, especially if if the background has similar tones to the skin you want to fix up. But it does an awesome job, easily for people like me who rarely take people photos.

One thing about Sean's awesomeness is that he has a point system for plugins you purchase. I've clocked up a bit of points, and have since got 2 pay plugins, for free! The two images above have been run through Matty Pro, my latest plugin that I got using the point redemption system. It has quite a few functions such as watermarking, frame creation what I enjoy using currently, putting a custom .png image with alpha channel as a frame. Less time spent in GIMP the better :)

No comments: