Lumière d’Argent

Stephane :: Jul.31.2009 :: Pictures :: No Comments »

Stephane :: Apr.09.2009 :: Pictures :: No Comments »

This post title could relate to the illustrating picture, but that's not my intention.

What inspires that post is the current situation at Bibble Labs. They develop and a remarkable raw converter called Bibble. I am not sure if they still sell anything, because they have publicly announced they have stopped supporting, correcting and enhancing their current product because the new one should be available soon. That includes not adding support for new cameras. Since I have no plan of buying any new digital camera I should not care too much.

But I do. Because the next version, that was supposed to be here real soon is not going to be. In fact, that development appears to be so mismanaged that it raises questions on the company viability. And I am not going to spend time in Bibble if that product is a dead end. Any operating system update could make stop working.

It Bibble 5 gets released before the company melts down and if it is a quality product, it will probably be the best raw converter on the planet. But at this stage, I am doubtful it will be released before having been rendered irrelevant by the competition.

Let's hope I am dead wrong.

Stephane :: Mar.30.2009 :: Pictures, Software :: No Comments »

Last year, Colin Jago talked on his blog of an interesting software for negative scanners: Colorneg.

I downloaded the trial version and gave it a go. It did indeed produce fine results but at that stage I was reluctant to add yet another software. Moreover, at the time, I was not really using film all that much.

Since then I have started again to use my Leica and so the question of B&W film scanning and processing became current for me too.

For digital processing, depending on my inconsistency among other things, I currently use Aperture, Photoshop CS3, Bibble Pro, QuadtoneRIP and some nice PhotoShop plugins.  Still reluctant to add yet another software piece, I tried different things. Clearly, VueScan is best at driving my Epson scanner. Its B&W output is adequate but not exactly great and the control it offers does not suit me. Besides, I like the idea of scanning to RAW. I find the curves to apply to VueScan RAW files quite steep and I produced unwanted effects that way.

I then noticed the DNG option in VueScan. It produces a DNG raw file, just ready for Adobe Camera Raw. That software was designed precisely to do what I need: correctly map a gamma 1 file to the more useful gamma 2.2 or 1.8 or whatever is in QTR Lab space. It works beautifully. The trick to invert the picture in ACR is to use the point curve, select the Linear setting and invert its slope. The controls in ACR allow to produce a very good starting point for further finishing in PhotoShop.

Stephane :: Oct.19.2008 :: Film, Scanning, Software :: No Comments »