Just wanted to throw a message out there to all you Linux users who either struggled with the dcraw CLI, or gave up on it completely. Bibble 4.0 works beautifully on Linux (2.4/2.6 kernels). I'm running it now on Fedora Core 2 on an Athlon 2000 with 1.5gb RAM. It works with RAW as fast a GIMP 2 works with JPG. I'm literally amazed at how fast this app is on my system; Not that it was bad before, but this is really incredible.
Bibble brings a completely color managed workflow to Linux - it supports more profiles than I'd heard of. Of course, good luck calibrating your monitor under Linux :) But at least there's a potential now, and you have a way to get those RGB images into sRGB without awkward command lines.
The software has many other features I'm fairly impressed with including a fairly simple way to lay out multiple images on a single page for printing, batch processing queues, tethered shooting, and more. Let me also point out how frustrating it's been trying to browse my NEFs previously - I had to batch process a series of thumbnails. Bibble has a nice NEF browser that's every bit as fast as GThumb with JPG. I'm also impressed with the pro version's ability to edit IPTC fields so the meta-data stays with the image.
The final thing I wanted to point out is that while this isn't open source software, it is reasonably priced at $129 for the pro version and $69 for the basic version. The author is kind enough to put evaluation versions up for you to "try before you buy" which I'm grateful for.
Thom Hogan doesn't rate Bibble highly compared to its competition, but Digital Outback Photo seems to use it exentively. I'm sure that like most software some love it and others hate it. The bottom line here is that prior to Bibble 4.0 there was no professional grade RAW workflow management solution on Linux, and now it exists.
If any other Linux users have questions about the software, or have things they'd like to see evaulauated, let me know and I'll be glad to post results here. After about 10 minutes of evaluation, I'm 90% confident I'll be purchasing a pro license this evening.
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