Turn a mass of RAW files into color-optimized, noise-free, tonally balanced photos.

When digital photographers shoot in RAW mode, the image data is transferred directly from the imaging chip to the storage medium without any processing or compression. Most serious photographers prefer this unaltered state because it offers the most freedom to achieve cool effects and touch up images in postproduction. Many photographers use applications like Bibble Pro to tweak large batches of photos to perfection. Bibble boasts numerous features that correct color, adjust white balance, sharpen, saturate, remove noise, and more - all without permanently altering the original image.

With SLRs, photographers tend to shoot hundreds (if not thousands) of pictures during a session, so an app that allows batch processing of RAW images is a must. Bibble lets you take a large set of images that were shot with one camera and under similar conditions, apply adjustments to one image, and then batch-process the rest of your pics with the same settings, saving a lot of time.

Bibble has tools for browsing, correcting, tagging, and sorting RAW images. Two standouts are the Lens Correction tool, which lets you fix pincushion and barrel distortion caused by extreme wide-angle and telephoto lens settings, and a Clone and Healing tool, which can fix blemishes and spots over a series of images. And the amazing new Black and White plug-in instantly converts color shots to gorgeous black-and-whites—and is almost worth the
price of the entire application (more on that later).

Bibble is an intuitive app to use. Icons and menu entries are logically labeled, and you can customize the interface to suit the way you work. Panels, which can float or remain docked, offer access to a host of features, everything from basic levels correction to exposure adjustment and highlight recovery, with various color-balance gadgets along the way.

Bibble Labs incorporates two third-party technologies that work wonders: Athentech’s Perfectly Clear (www.athentech.com), which optimizes the lighting in an image while maintaining color fidelity, and PictureCode’s Noise Ninja, which can remove annoying noise from a photo without turning it to visual mush. It’s not all good news, however, because you must purchase a Noise Ninja Pro license ($69.95 or $79.95) to use the advanced features of Noise Ninja.

Hands down, the best tool in the package is Bibble’s Black and White plug-in. You could spend ages in Photoshop desaturating and adjusting individual channels to arrive at the right tonal balance for a black-and-white photo. But Black and White makes achieving high-contrast mono images the work of a few mouse clicks - provided, of course, that the original images have good tonal values.

You may wonder how Bibble Pro compares to Apple’s Aperture. Bibble lacks the library management, whiz-bang interface, and versioning features of Aperture. But Bibble is much faster at RAW conversion, and it works on older Macs.

The bottom line. Aperture is a better tool for image organization. But for the price, Bibble should not be overlooked. It’s a truly great batch-processing tool for RAW image adjustments.

COMPANY: Bibble Labs
CONTACT: www.bibblelabs.com
PRICE: $129.95
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, 512MB RAM, 1GB disk space
Clear and usable interface. Brilliant plug-in for black-and-white conversions. Universal binary.
Previews are slow to update. Extra cost for advanced Noise Ninja registration.