New Bibble focuses on RAW speed, and more!
By
Mike Tomkins
(Thursday, April 5, 2001 - 16:27 EDT)
Bibble gets a boost for Canon D30 raw files, and an extra treat...
Owners of Canon's EOS D30 digital camera will be relieved to hear of a new version of popular imaging program Bibble that promises to make the CCD-RAW format of their cameras a lot more useful. Eric Hyman, creator of Bibble has been hard at work ever since the last Bibble releases (mid-December 2000 for the PC version, mid-January 2001 for the Mac version) and has managed to crack the format of Canon's proprietary .CRW CCD-RAW files! What this means is that Bibble is now the only third-party program to be able to open .CRW files without using Canon's drivers, and Eric claims a 2-3x speed increase opening CCD-RAW files with Bibble as compared to via Canon's drivers!
Our own tests confirmed this... A sample .CRW file took us 41 seconds to convert through Canon's ZoomBrowser EX (plus another second or so to build the thumbnail for the TIF file created), whilst TWAIN acquiring the same file with Canon's plugin in Paint Shop Pro 6 took 38 seconds. Decompressing the image in Bibble 2.5, however, took only 18 seconds - more than double the speed of Canon's software! These tests were done on a rather dated and overloaded Pentium III 500 system with 128MB of RAM, Windows 2000 and a couple of other applications running simultaneously, incidentally - on a more modern computer that was properly optimized, the times would likely be even better!
Bibble 2.5 also has a number of other changes, and a summary of new features and bug fixes is below. We spotted one new feature that isn't mentioned anywhere though - support for Olympus' Camedia E-10 raw file format, which has the .ORF extension.
We spoke to Eric about this, and he told us that he's currently working on implementing .ORF support for Bibble, which would give Bibble the widest RAW capabilities of any program we've yet seen (the program already does Nikon's .NEF format from the D1 camera, as well as the super-fast .CRW support). According to Eric, the .ORF conversion is not officially supported yet, and whilst it will function it does not yet profile images. the plan is to work on any bugs that crop up with D30 raw files on the PC version, then provide support for D30 raw files in MacBibble, and then work on the Olympus E10 raw functionality. (Don't flood Eric with emails about the E10 raw file conversion, please - as we mentioned, it is not supported and the more email he has to deal with, the longer it will be until he has time to complete coding this feature!)
Here's the official list of changes in Bibble v2.5: - * NEW * Complete support for D30 including CRW's/Jpegs/Exif
- * NEW * Dramatic 3X-2x Speed increase when decoding CRW files.
- * NEW * Enhanced D30 Raw color using custom profile.
- * NEW * Canons drivers no longer needed for CRW files.
- * NEW * D30 Files preserve EXIF info when saved.
- Changed preview in general options to default to full size.
- Changed Click white to use average of area around click.
- Changed default Autolevel parameters to smaller values.
- Added Bibble to EXIF software info.
- Added File:Reset to reset options and reset registry.
- Improved ICC Color management routines.
- Improved speed of Photoshop plugin.
- Fixed Blank D30 Images when preview options was off.
- Fixed copyright getting assigned to Nikon 8)
- Fixed problem with Monitor ICM selection becoming garbage/crashing.
- Fixed problem with options display preview incorrect sometimes on first use.
- Fixed crash when rotation or noise removal was used in options.
- Fixed problem with Repeatedly asking for Jpeg compression size in batch.
- Extended 10 day trial for previous trialee's.
Note that at the time of this writing, the Bibble website appears to be down... Keep checking back and it will likely be working again soon!
Source:
Bibble website
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