A collection of miscellaneous information, to be organized.
Many of my plug-ins have sliders with very wide ranges of adjustment. If you're accustomed to just hauling the pointer around (as in Bibble's own sliders) to make minor changes, you'll be shocked at what happens when you do that. The folks at Bibble Labs and I have a philosophical disagreement about control ranges -- I think controls should allow extreme adjustments for creative experimentation, while they think that controls should be easy to use and not affect things dramatically.
Fortunately, there is a way to combine both approaches: Use the mouse wheel while hovering the mouse pointer over the slider. Each tick of the mouse wheel moves the pointer by its smallest adjustment. Also, clicking the mouse while hovering to the left or right of the pointer moves the pointer a small but useful amount.
I've made sure all sliders in my plug-ins respond well to these adjustment techniques, while not limiting what you can do with the plug-ins to express your creativity.
Bibble provides built-in functionality for saving/loading settings of individual plug-ins. Click the icon at the upper right of the plug-in (the little green down arrow) and select "Save..." The file you create contains just the settings for that plug-in form. This is a great way to re-use your settings on different images, and sending settings files to your friends.
Great question, and one I should cover in the documentation. Here's the order the plug-ins integrate with Bibble:
The best way to approach things in Bibble is generally in that order, keeping in mind that if you're aiming for a B&W target that Sadie and Huey are probably not important; conversely if you're doing colour output, Andy and Tony won't be used.
With that in mind, then, here's a good way to approach a colour image:
A black and white image:
Of course you can go back anytime to an ealier stage, but it is certainly helpful to know when you adjust a slider in Siggy that it's going to make a big difference by the time it gets to Andy.
Hope this helps!
Here are three sample starting settings for Siggy for three different photo situations.
For portraiture, Siggy settings that reduce skin tone contrast, soften highlights and lift detail out of shadows would be in order. Set Siggy to:
On the other hand, landscape photography often benefits from a little more contrast in the lower midtones to bring out detail and lift atmospheric haze. Landscapes often also have blown (or nearly blown) highlights, which in combination with Bibble's Highlight Recovery, a large alteration of the Highlight control can help.
The midpoint slider will probably need to be moved to find the best place for the contrast effect. Move it around until you like the result.
Finally, still life frequently wants to have its shadows darkened even further to add drama, while the highlights need to be tamed due to point source blowouts. And a little more contrast in the midtone probably won't hurt.
And finally a note -- when shooting digital, I find it much better to underexpose the main image slightly if it means highlights will not be blown out. It is much easier on the eye to deal with a little extra noise in an image by bringing up the shadows than to try and make completely blown highlights look good. Siggy makes this correction easy. Take an underexposed image and move the "bright" slider to the right. Automatically, shadows are expanded, troublesome highlights are compressed, and contrast is adjusted to give better detail in the midtones.
I hope these tips help.
-s