Taking thousands of pictures is nice. Taking them in RAW format is nicer.
Working with RAW format files however, is not.
At least, it used to be an unpleasant experience. Nowadays there is some very nice software on the market to help you optimize your shoot to RAW to JPG workflow. For example Adobe Lightroom, Aperture for Macs, and Bibble PRO for me! I'm just using one solution in many, but it works very nicely for me, so it might work for you too.
Why RAW files and not just JPGs? The D200 does create wonderful jpegs, however I like to tinker with my images, and the extra bits of depth - 10/12 bit images vs 8 bit lossy compressed - allow me to tweak various settings without loosing any detail. This allows for amazing post processing tricks and effects. The usual complaints about working with RAW files is that they're much bigger, and that working with them is much slower. The current price of memory cards negates the first downside, and Bibble negates the latter. The only remaining downside of RAW files is that as soon as you've gotten used to working with them you'll forever cry about not having learned this trick sooner! :-)
Why Bibble?
And why not any of the other products? Hmm. Speed! For a better answer I'll first describe my workflow.
| stage: | shooting stage | copying stage | scanning stage |
|---|---|---|---|
| what happens: | I make pictures! I'll check them for sharpness on camera by zooming. This can be done rapidly with the the center button of the multi-selector if you set setting f1to Zoom on/off, the default is silly anyway. | A card full of images! I duplicate the card to my hard drive and to my external drive just in case a drive breaks down. I've not yet scripted this part and for now it's plain cp that does the job. | Using Bibble browser mode (F7) with side panes disabled (TAB) I scroll through the images quicky, giving them ratings (using keys 1 to 5) on wether I like them or not. |
| neat tricks: | Know! Your! Camera! | Linux is your friend! | Know your hotkeys! |
| number of images: | +- 200 (100%) | +- 200 (100%) | 50 (25%) |
| time involved: | as long as it takes, and I am there, which usually coincides. | 5 minutes | 20 minutes |
| stage: | postprocessing stage | upload stage | and then... |
|---|---|---|---|
| what happens: | I now set Bibble to show only images I've rated, so I loose about 75% of the images. I re-enable the side pane and go through the images one by one, correcting exposure, white balance, re-cropping etc. as needed. For the images that I think deserve more attention I'll pull out the rack of processing effects and plugins Bibble has to offer. Using Ctrl-I I'll also add some IPTC names and tags to the pictures, so Flickr will use those. | I upload all images to Flickr using any uploadr tool at hand. I usually work from more than one computer so it depends where I am which tool I am going to use. After uploading I add some more tags to the photos. | The afterlife! The next few weeks I sometimes add tags and/or remove images if a) I think they're not worth staying online anymore or b) somebody on the picture explicitly requested removal, which luckily rarely happens. :-) |
| neat tricks: | Use copy / paste to transfer settings from one image to another | Batch-tag! Organizr is your friend too! | Think before you act! |
| number of images: | < 20 (10%) | 10 .. 20 (5% .. 10%) | 10 .. 20 (5% .. 10%) |
| time involved: | 2 minutes for regular images, up to 15 minutes for image I think deserve some attention. This is the fun part! | about 10 minutes waiting for Flickr | forever :-) |
So, why Bibble?
Oh I haven't answered that question yet? Hmm.. because:
- It runs on Linux! (and Windows (and Mac))
- It is FAST! For a program
to be considered fast it needs to:
- allow the user to enter commands very quickly, Bibble has a great selection of customizable hotkeys for this. For example, I like the fact that pressing F produces a full rez JPG instantly.
- be fast in giving results to the user, and allowing the user to enter responses to that. In this Bibble does wonders too - especially when compared to the Nikon software or to Adobe Lightroom. The workflow is very batch orriented, the user can work on other images will the computer is still crunching away on converting the previous images. Multi-core helps here too!
- Absolutely important: the end results look very nice!
- There are some great plugins out there which will really help making pictures even better!
- It is relatively cheap, and well worth it.
Plug ins?
Bibble supports plugins, I regularly use the following ones:
- ND Grad by Roger Barnes - a great graduated neutral density filter simulator for your pictures. Is the sky overexposed but the rest not? Fix it with ease :-) And there are so many other neat tricks with this filter!
- Seam n. Puckett's plug ins - he writes a whole bunch of nice plugins! I'm still learning how and when to use them, but the effects are beautiful! The plugins do cost money, but not a lot, and Sean does provide freeware versions of the nicest plugins.
- Spectrum from Maas-Maarten Zeeman - a great plugin which I use to selectively over-saturate or de-saturate certain colors in images.
I'll add some example images to this list to explain the various effects soon!