Grand River

Three versions of the same photo.

A year ago I took a couple pix in the yard, then a couple more downtown, before heading north to the Charlotte Highway boat/canoe access on the Grand River. This photo was taken from beneath the bridge, looking upriver (east).

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Obviously, Joel, the day's story's about post-processing....

Yup. I'd been using Bibble Pro for nearly five years, a year ago, and October 4 was the day I finally decided to learn how to use it to fully process photographs. To this point I'd used Bibble as follows:

* For all photographs, it was my slide sorter.
* For black and white photographs it was my primary processing tool, but I mostly used the Andrea plugin for that purpose. I wanted to get beyond that.
* For color photographs, excepting baseball pix, my main non-sorting use was for cropping--and that inconsistently. Final processing was generally done in Photoshop Elements, largely because PSE's the stronger tool. But I wanted to better understand the strengths and limits of Bibble for my purposes.
* For baseball pix I routinely used Bibble to make minor tweaks to large numbers of photographs, and basically never used PSE. That was not an issue last October 4.

So I spent the day playing with Bibble's controls. I'd pull up a photograph and move the sliders around until I was happy with the result.

Or unhappy. In which case I'd just reset-to-original and try again. One of Bibble's strengths is that it never modifies the original photograph, so you can always retreat and start over. In the process I learned a lot about how the various controls change my photographs.

I found, as I anticipated, that Bibble would usually let me work the photograph to something I wanted. So Bibble--and now Corel Aftershot Pro, which is a reskinned version of the product--became my primary processing tool for all photographs.

I still use PSE on occasional images--usually to recover a difficult problem, or to add specific filters. I also use Elements to add the skinny frames. But for the past year most of my photo processing has occurred in Bibble or Aftershot. Doing so has changed my photography's look a bit, perhaps for the better. New tools--or even old tools, properly understood--can do that for you.

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This photograph is an outtake--actually, a different version of the photo--from my 2012 photo-a-day project, 366 Snaps.

366 Snaps project discussion and stats for October 4.