Bibble 5 discontinued as Corel takes over

Through a post in the company's forums, Bibble Labs president Jeff Stephens today revealed that the company was purchased last year by Ontario-based Corel Corp., and has now brought development of popular RAW file converter Bibble 5 to an end, with the release of Bibble 5.2.3.

Bibble Labs was founded by developer Eric Hyman back in the early days of the digital imaging revolution, and its products have been mentioned many times on this site over the last decade or more. The company joins a long list of Corel acquisitions, key among which are Jasc Software Inc. and Ulead Systems, creators of Paint Shop Pro and VideoStudio respectively. (Another instantly recognizable product, albeit not quite so directly digital imaging-related, was WinZip Computing, creator of the popular compression utility WinZip.)  Developments of those products all continue under the Corel brand, and a new release following in the footsteps of Bibble is apparently also imminent, although we don't yet know if the name will be retained, nor how much of the program's DNA will make it into the new product.

According to the forum post, all Bibble Labs' employees have transitioned to Corel, and will continue to be based in Austin, Texas. The new Bibble-based product will continue to retain support not only for the Windows platform, but also Mac OS and Linux machines. More details will be provided alongside the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which kicks off next week.

As for Bibble 5, which debuted just a little over two years ago, version 5.2.3 is said to be the final release, and includes support for a variety of new cameras, plus a number of bug fixes, as detailed below (courtesy of Bibble Labs). 

Changes in Bibble 5.2.3

New Camera Support

• Olympus E-P3, E-PL3, E-PM1, XZ-1

• Panasonic G3, GF1

• Leica V-LUX 2, D-LUX 5

• Nikon D5100, P7100, V1, J1

• Sony A-77, A-65, NEX-5N

Camera Changes

• Updated WB & WB Preset values for the D7000

• Updated White & Black levels for D7000 as well as interpolation parameters

• The wrong camera profile was being returned for the E-600

• Color handling improvements for Canon 7D

Color Management Improvements

• Color handling improvements

• Ability to apply custom camera profiles.

Crash Prevention & Improvements

• Loads of memory leaks fixed

• Fix for deallock on 1 core computers

• Many scheduling improvements, especially on 1 and 2 core systems

• Works with OSX 10.7 (Lion)

Other Improvements

• Open in External Editor command

• click the RGB status color well for options

• 0001579: introduce three colors for Keywords panel

• Added a Blacks slider for adjusting the Black Point slider from 'Range' to 'Fill Range' and remove the Fill Contrast dropdown

RAW Noise Suppression

• There is one new control on the Basic tool panel, and several on the Details -> Sharpen & Noise panel. The Details panel controls are as follows:

  • Raw Impulse Noise Removal - turning this on tells Bibble to look for stuck or dead pixels and remove them - not just those due to defective photosites on sensors, but also due to high ISO noise. Some cameras, like newer Canon's, show a lot of this type of noise starting around ISO 800.

  • RAW Noise - this is a "RAW Level" denoising process before demosaicing. Checkbox turns it on or off, slider controls strength (really just blending back the original).

  • Threshold - Tells Bibble how much noise there is, or where the signal to noise ratio is. Use higher settings for noisier images. It's already biased by image settings (ISO), so it expects ISO 3200 to be noisier than ISO 100.

  Note also that you can't do 'RAW Noise' without also doing Impulse Noise Removal (but you can do Impulse removal without doing RAW Noise.