My old photography writings: Acid morning rising over Göteborg (or my batch output settings for Bibble 5)

Some shots from an early freezing morning walk. These were actually aimed to the west- the sun was rising behind my back. It was amazing to watch the purple glowing haze come down all over the city and then just disappear over the horizon... Not always the best action is with the sun :)

Jump into full post if you care about batch processing settings I have for Bibble 5. Some thoughts about Bibbles sharpening in there too. Otherwise, enjoy the view. I had great two hours on that hill with -10° C and Terra to keep me company (some running around with a dog is a good way to warm up :)).

One of the cool things about Bibble 5 is the ultra fast batch processing of pictures. It stamps on the signature onto a whole bunch of RAW files and spits out JPEGs in seconds. The speed is just amazing!

The normal settings I have for the images I post to this blog are these:

The JPEG quality is at 95% because anything below 90 might produce weird artifacts - for example strange ripples around smoke of the above chimneys. Here they are, processed with quality set to 83%:

This is kinda strange as in GIMP I always use 83% for web output and it works just fine. Well, I just assume it is a number and can definitely live with it (ooops, the file size is bigger too... amm... just another number?.. well, lets say it does not matter in this age of fiber optics...).

I also apply the signature preset which I created with the help of TypeWriter plugin (more on this coming with the rest of the plugin story soon).

Now we come to the interesting part - Sizing and Sharpening. To fit the blog layout, I want the pictures to be max 500 pixels wide, hence the settings for Sizing. The 'Normal' mode is slower but generates better quality. It is still fast like hell, so never even thought of using the Proof mode. Now lets add a bit of sharpening (OK, in other tools 70/0.6/0 is more than a bit). So here we are, simple as that.

BUT IT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH!

You are more than welcome to beat me up in the comments of this post if I am doing something wrong, but I can't find the perfect settings to make my small-sized images sharp directly out of Bibble 5.

I was trying to do this with dozens of different output sharpening settings and I never see a result which I really like whole 100%. If you look at the above images more closely you will see that they are a bit fussy and they were processed with not so standard 200/0.8/0 sharpening settings! Now I have to mention that this is no issue for pictures with not too much detail, but here with all the small lamps and chimneys and windows of the plant... the output is just sad...

Did some more testing of this issue and I think it involves both sharpening and sizing.

First off, sharpening with radius of under 0.6 is worthless and gives a completely fussy picture. Having radius set to 0.6 means that my small street lamps are now blobish looking spots.

Next I thought of testing out Bibble 5 vs GIMP in regards to sharpening/sizing.

First image Bibble resizing + Bibble sharpening, second- Bibble resize + Gimp sharpening, third - Gimp + Gimp (both cases Gimp unsharp mask had 0.4/0.4/0 settings):

First lets acknowledge the truth- best looking details are in third picture.

Now the middle one, the one which was resized with Bibble and sharpened with Gimp, it looks... just as sad as the first one, the one completely processed with Bibble... Is it right to conclude then that the main chunk of fault should go to the sizing algorithm of Bibble 5? You tell me...

Say what you will, but I like to see the subtle details in the Gimp only version of this image. Maybe someone just browsing by will never notice this and there definitely is no issue when exporting full size images from Bibble 5 for print, but I am surely going to look into resizing my blog pictures with the Gimp until this is fixed within Bibble or I am taught a good lesson how to use Bibbles resizing/sharpening...

Full Gimp+Gimp version: