Nikon Capture versus Bibble for D1X users...Flaw in Bibble?

[Mark_Henninger]

I shoot a Nikon D1X and have used both Bibble and Qimage. I also use Nikon Capture. I would like to relay my experiences.

The first RAW converter I owned was Qimage, but in fact I used it as a Software RIP for my Roland HiFi Jet. When I first started shooting RAW on my D1X (some months after I purchased it) it was because I found out about the 10-mega-pixel output. The problem is that Qimage uses the cameraís white balance settings.

Eventually I purchased Nikon capture 3.0 because I was interested in tethered shooting. I photograph golf courses, and bringing a laptop with me (my partner runs the laptop, I do the shooting) allowed me a great deal of flexibility.

With the release of Capture 3.5 I was excited about being able to create 10mp files and still use all of capture editors features. Then I tried the new release of BibbleÖversion 3.

For a couple of days I was in love. Bibble recreates greens much more vividly, and to that seemed enough to sell me. That and its ability to adjust all of the RAW parameters and apply them at the browser level. I am very obsessive though. I started running tests.

Here is what I concluded:

Qimage is great for printing, not so great for converting RAW files. The quality is there but the control is not, so Iíll discuss Capture 3.5 versus Bibble 3

Nikon capture may be unintuitive and slow compared to Bibble, but it is much more bulletproof when it comes to faithfully reproducing color and detail. When I tested an indoor photo that mixed incandescent light with daylight coming through the windows, I found that Bibbleís color rendition would fail in several ways.

With Bibble, backlit, high contrast details featured more chromatic aberration. I color balanced my image for incandescent lighting and Bibble changed the colorcast of the daylight to magenta. It should have been rendered as cyan. When I used the Qimage D1X profile in Bibble, the aberration was reduced and the color balance was restored. It is actually nice that Bibble lets you choose the profile with which to render RAW files. I felt that it might be worth my money at this pointÖbut as I said, I am obsessive.

I wanted to know why I couldnít use Capture to get the best possible images regardless of the subject. The solution, it turns out, is using Wide Gamut RGB as a substitution for Adobe RGB in Captureís color management settings. Performing a profile conversion from Wide Gamut RGB inside Photoshop preserves much more tonality and color accuracy than if the output file is tagged with any other profile. Seriously. With 16 bit TIFFs the there is little chance of banding, so Wide Gamut RGB is safeÖjust make sure you convert to a smaller color space before you edit in 8 bits/channel.

With my camera, Capture still seems to create images with too much yellow in them, which I confirmed by photographing a gray card in direct sunlight. Creating a custom curve in Capture using the gray eyedropper fixed that, and is the right choice for assuring correct color balance in any lighting situation. You donít need to profile the camera with special software and with daylight once you have your custom curve, you can rely on that indefinitely.

Having conquered Captureís flaws in color rendition, it became possible to objectively compare it to Bibble. Every photo that included details in highlight areas seemed to render better in Capture. Bibbleís Kodak color management seems to be biased towards pretty colors. Capture, once calibrated, is more faithful to original scene.

Resolution seems to be about the same for Capture, Bibble and Qimage. I know that resolution charts rendered in Bibble and Qimage reproduce the vertical resolution test without any moirÈ, whereas Capture shows a little in the 1200-1400 LPI area. Not surprising, but I think that in practice Nikon is using some sort of anti-aliasing that fails when it comes to reproducing resolution charts but in real-life scenes actually produces a better result.

I only want to share my experience and I understand that there are a lot of subjective judgments involved when it comes to what makes one rendition of a photo better than another, but I believe that Nikon Capture does the best job of maintaining the overall integrity of the data contained in D1X RAW files.

As a result I have decided that Bibble is not worth paying for unless you need pretty pictures rendered fast. Personally I think that it is too error prone, but I can see its appealÖbut the romance is gone.

I'd love to hear about other experiences.

[ January 30, 2003: Message edited by: Epicurian ]

[BradMogen]

Epicurian,

Are your comments all directed toward the PC versions of the software packages? Do you know if the Mac version of Bibble does the same thing, i.e. is there any difference in the platform you use?

[Mark_Henninger]

[Are your comments all directed toward the PC versions of the software packages]

I should have specified that I work on a PC. I have not used Bibble or Nikon Capture on a Mac. Qimage is PC only, but not a contender anyway.

The color profiles, and the color processing algorithms for these applications are not different from one platform to another. My guess (and it's only a guess until I can test some demo versions on a Mac workstation using the same photos) is that the results would be identical.

Bibble is using the Kodak Digital Science Color Engine for color management, and the flaws in the color rendering disappear when I use the Qimage (or the Nikon) color profile for D1X RAW files, so I think the flaw is in the Bibble D1X profile itself, as processed by Kodak DSCE, not in the underlying code, which should behave the same on either platform. This also means that Bibble may not have similar problems when processing RAW files from other cameras. I have an Olympus E10 (never gets used) but just for fun I used Bibble to convert an .ORF file and it did a wonderful job.

It is true that with Photoshop there are perceptible differences between ColorSync and Adobe ACE, and on a PC between Microsoft ICM and Adobe ACE in terms of color rendering. Most notably, Adobe ACE doesn't do as good a job in terms of noise suppression as ColorSync or Microsoft ICM, but on a PC Microsoft ICM has a glitch that prevents accurate conversion to Grayscale. Adobe ACE works the same way on Macs and PCs, however. In that sense, using ColorSync in Photoshop on a Mac provides the most predictable, high quality results, but using Bibble with Kodak DSCE is like using Photoshop with Adobe ACE, the results should be the same on either platform.