Bibble 5 Raw Photo Editor Arrives
Bibble 5 adds a number of new features for editing, cataloging, and performance. The company had hoped to release Bibble 5 in 2008 but ran into delays. Also new is the price. The Pro version of Bibble 5 costs US$199.95, up from US$129.95 for Bibble 4 Pro; those who bought Bibble 4 Pro after September 1, 2006, however, get a free upgrade. Bibble 5 Lite hasn’t been released yet, but the company said Bibble 4 Lite customers may use Bibble 5 Pro until it is.
One feature of Bibble 5 is selective editing, which lets photographers change only a portion of an image. The editing is nondestructive, which means the changes don’t alter the underlying raw file. Another is cataloging features to more easily manage files and sift through libraries. Performance is a major issue for raw processing, a computationally demanding chore, and Bibble appears particularly pleased with its performance improvements. The software is able to take advantage of all the processing cores on a 32-core system, according to the company. Although the incremental benefits of more cores diminish, Bibble boasts that its software can scale even as unnamed competitors’ performance doesn’t get any better beyond eight cores.
