Last week, Bibble Labs announced that they have been bought over my Corel. I think I snorted out some of the tea I was drinking. Like... what. the. hell?!
Apart from OS upgrades and reinstalls, RAW converter changes annoy me. Alot. Between bibble 4 and 5, they'd made a change to their rendering engine, and whilst it was for the better, I need to re-learn all the tools again.
So what about AfterShot? For the moment, I've got the trial version - and us Bibble 5 users get to purchase the full version for £14, so it's quite a good deal. Well it had better be a good deal since Bibble is now sold to Corel for goodness sake.
Initial tests went well. Loaded it up, set my icc profile, reset, and tested on some D300 and LX5 files.
Out of the box, AfterShot IS bibble, all the familiar commands are there, and on my Linux box, it actually seems to run smoother, and the UI seems to work better. Props to the team there. Noise Ninja seems to be the full version, but it could also be a system thing since I'd purchased the full version years ago.
In general, the controls I use mainly in B5 have moved over seamlessly to AfterShot. There are some custom curves I have developed over time that I will probably need to port over, but it's not difficult to come up with new "looks".
The D300 raws ran as expected, though I feel that the click white tool *may* work better previously, but it's hard to say. LX5 wise, the click white tool still does not work as expected, and the color balance profiles just don't work. Thankfully, the LX5 has much better white balance detection compared to the D300, and the "As Shot" profile usually gives very good results. Usually. I've had one or two LX5 raw files come in... green.... and it was a picture of a piece of paper.....
This is the thing with digital photography, raws are good and all, but I wonder, I wonder, when will my D300 raws be no longer viewable?
On the flip side, fact: My photographs aren't exactly pro-level "omg awesome" level good, so even losing them won't mean much. Plus, all the keepers are already exported to full sized jpegs, so at least there's that.
Bottom line, the new piece of software works, and time spent agonizing over the D300's raw format is a waste of time. Time better spent say, oh, doing houdini or figuring out chord voicings.
Wolf, out.
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