Bibble Labs purchased by Corel

Hi everyone: I'm Jeff Stephens, previously the president of Bibble Labs and now I run product development for the new Corel AfterShot Pro. Yesterday was an exciting day for us, launching AfterShot Pro at CES. I hope this answers some of your questions about Corel's purchase of Bibble Labs and the new product.
The Corel team is committed and are excited about our technology and processing power, and the opportunities we see to take the product forward. Corel is eager to invest even more in development and in bringing our technology to even more users -- something that Bibble Labs simply couldn’t afford to do on our own. All of us at Bibble have joined the Corel team. We're keeping Mac and Linux support.
Thanks for your enthusiasm. I look forward to hearing your feedback.
Jeff

I've been a longtime user of Paint Shop Pro (Since it was owned by JASC). When they were bought by Corel the software suffered greatly, however, I believe they are on the right track with the last couple of releases. I prefer PSPx4 over Photoshop Essentials.

I have a Canon 60D and used DPP to edit RAW images. As a beta tester I used AfterShot before I knew it was formerly Bibble (I knew of Bibble, but never used it) I was really surprised how well I liked it. It does complement Paintshop Pro very well.

Buying Bibble was a good move for Corel. Hopefully Corel will continue to allow the folks at Bibble continue developing a nice piec of software.

I have just tried the new product. It's called Corel AfterShot Pro and it is very similar to B5. The new software costs £80 or £60 as an upgrade from B5, PSP, Lightroom and Aperture. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux (which I use) as B5 was.

That's fine as far as it stands but as a Fuji X100 user there is still the problem that it doesn't work with X100 raw files, though I note that PSP X5 does so there may be hope. One more point is that it can process DNG files according to the list on the product page.

http://www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?pid=prod4670071&cid=catalog3550067&segid=6000006&onyxcampaignid=&promo=&dcs_action=&url_coupon=&storeKey=&mapcounter=

So until it supports the X100, I have no personal need to move to the new software as it doesn't offer anything new to me.

It's probably a good thing, or at least no worse.

I started using Bibble with version 4 and the whole version 5 series isn't as good. Usability has gone backwards and it takes ages to release support for new cameras.

The speed is impressive and I like the Noise Ninja integration. But aside from that I prefer RawTherapee which is free.

Not selling Bibble 5 anymore seems like a mistake... This is a clear signal that the existing technology is dead. Companies who hire a new employee can't buy a new license.

Linux support is probably dead. That's what Corel did for WordPerfect -- they killed sdcorp, who developed a Linux version, made their own slow and buggy version, which didn't sell, and which was promptly killed.

Access to Corel's Q&A, UI, distribution, etc. teams won't help Bibble. Those teams all suck. Unless Corel plans to buy replacements for all of them too...

Only upside might be that we'll see some features Bibble was ideologically opposed to, but that were essential -- like DNG support.

Corel seems to buyout small companies that have excellent products and then lets them die on the vine. I hope that is not the case with Bibble! They killed my Ulead programs.

If only a company could break the Adobe quasi-monopoly..

To me, Corel seems to be the place where once-great-apps go to die as others have said below. It's one of those companies that every few years I go "wow, they're still around?".

But I hope this works out for all involved.

I hope they bring something to market closer to Lightroom/Aperature without losing it's strengths.

This is not good news for Bibble users. I've been using Bibble since 2005.

If Corel turns out to be good for Bibble users, it will be a first for Corel. I have no confidence that Corel's ownership will result in a product as good as Bibble. Look what they did to Quattro Pro. Look what they did to <fill in the blank>.

I'll probably continue to use Bibble until someday down the line when I have a camera it doesn't support. Then it will be time to look for a replacement, and I doubt Corel's offering will be among the finalists.

Greg

Damon, I love your optimism but, sadly, I disagree.
I used to be a Corel Draw user since 1992. They used to be really innovative, in both UI and features. However, they haven't done anything in the past 5 years or so. Even the Painter program, which they bought, they didn't really innovate much and now Adobe is bringing the same featues in Photoshop.

Corel is a company that is in survival mode. They just go on, and I would be sad to see them gone, but apparently they simply can't innovate anymore.

In contrast to most comments, I'm truly pleased with the news. Developing a top-flight raw converter and everything that goes with it takes serious resources. It's a testament to the Bibble developer's programming skills that they have managed to produce a converter that so efficiently uses the multiple cores of a modern CPU. That's an outstanding accomplishment. Is there any other raw converter that does so well in this respect?

Bibble has evolved hugely in the last decade or so on what I imagine to be limited resources, but like all complex software projects, has shortcomings and rough edges. I expect the product that emerges with Corel's help will be both more polished and have more useful features. I expect there to be more plugins, not less, and I expect they will improve in quality. I also expect that it will be a better marketed product. When I compare the marketing efforts of Bibble to Capture One for instance, it's obvious which product has far more $ behind it!

How do you say epic fail?

I think Bibble users are in for disappointment now that Corel is in the picture. Regardless, I'm glad I switched to Lightroom over a year ago.

Corel the software graveyard

Corel. The place software goes to die.

Sad.

Did anyone else read Jeff’s post on the Bibble forum before making their comments? Anyway it appears that there will continue to be a Linux solution and that is good news, but you have to wonder how plugins will work. Speaking of plugins it will be really great to have an alternative to the Adobe solution. Being able to use some of the better masking solutions from “Paintshop pro” within the Bibble RAW editing world could be a really great solution. With the bigger development environment available to support the product, we should see a bigger memory mode and maybe GPU acceleration as well as floating windows for two monitor support. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Bad wibes of iView Media Pro's destiny...

Corel + Bibble = Corel

That's bad news to start this year with...

Time to say goodbye to a great piece of independent RAW workflow software. I've been using Bibble for 6 years on Linux.

The next statement you will read from Corel is that "to optimize customer experience ... blah blah blah ... , we will drop Linux support". Thank you very much.

Then you'll see lots of useless "features", integration into things it doesn't need to be integrated into and finally, it will amalgamate with some of their mediocre software and disappear forever.

It may be the doom's day for me. As I am a Linux user.................