I’d been anxiously awaiting the new Bibble since seeing it at Photokina 2008. It especially has the one feature that I wanted – the ability to see two versions of your photo – the original and the one you’re working on. I received the email that it was available and logged into my account to take advantage of the upgrade pricing. Being in Germany, I was immediately transferred to a German company to fulfill my order. I would have no problem with that except for one thing: the software is only available for purchase in German. Even trying to upgrade using a proxy failed to work with a European credit card. Yes, I could purchase the software in German, but my preference is my mother tongue – English.

Two emails to Bibble support have so far been unanswered.

The good news is that they finally classified my “complex architectural issue” officially as a bug. The bad news is that they released the new version of ACDSee without fixing it.  I do wonder why they tout the program as a pro program when they don’t listen to the problems that the pro’s have with it?

Since I’ve used ACDSee for many years, I decided to give it one last chance. I guess you could call me a glutton for punishment…or maybe someone who finds it hard to give up a program that they’ve liked and used for many years.

Soon after opening Photoshop CS4 – and still having ACDSee version 3 open – Photoshop started closing unexpectedly citing DEP (Data Excecution Prevention) problems. As this has not happened before, and ACDSee is the only program that I had recently installed, I figured it was the issue. I rebooted my server and tried again – same issue. This happened a total of three times before I uninstalled ACDSee.

I’ve been working intensively with Photohop for four days now since uninstalling ACDSee and haven’t had CS4 close since. I’ve posted on their forum this latest bug and will be interested to see if I get any response (I never did when I asked if the program supported rendering by gpu). It will probably be called another “complex architectural issue”.

Call if what you want, but I still say it’s a

BUG!

Many photographers use Photoshop layers to “play” with their photos. That is, preserve the original in one layer and duplicate that layer to try out different effects. The result of that can be some pretty large files.

That’s exactly my situation. My files can range in size from 200 – 925 meg…yes, that’s megabyte. When I download my cards, I like to look at the photos first to discard what I don’t like and decide which I want to work on first.

That’s my primary use of ACDSee Pro Photo Manager 2.5. My biggest complaint with it was the infrequent crashing, mainly when trying to view/access large files. So, Wolf built me a new computer: running Windows Server 2008 SP2, 2-1terrabyte disks and 1-500 gig disk, 8 gig ram, gpu with 256 parallel processes. I run three virtual machines: one for email and non-photo related software; one for photo related software; one with Windows 7 for test purposes.

I tried running the Pro Photo Manager 2.5 on a virtual machine with the same results – the program couldn’t handle the large files. This was nothing unknown at ACDSee as I had talked to their product managers at the last three Photokina’s (2004, 2006 and 2008) and they all acknowledged the problem – and promised a solution.

You would think that five years would be enough time to find a solution, right?

They’ve come up with a Pro Photo Manager 3 beta in which they touted all new features. But, would it work with large files? I downloaded and installed the beta and kept my fingers crossed.

Within a few minutes – long enough for me to locate the largest file – I had my first crash. I tried once more with the same result. A post on their forum brought a(nother) acknowlegement of the inability of the program to open large files, a remark that this is not a bug (???)  and a plea to be patient a little while longer for a solution.

As a last trial, I installed the version 3 beta on my server. While it was able to read files up to 500 meg, the 920 meg file again crashed the program. In addition, the server started closing Photoshop due to DEP problems created by the version 3 beta. How do I know this for sure? The problem starting occurring after installing version 3 beta and stopped after deinstalling version 3 beta.

If you’re like me and work with large files, don’t waste your money on Version 3. And don’t wait for ACDSee to fix the problem any time soon as it seems to be low on their list. A shame they don’t mention it on their website as a limitation of the “Pro” program.

I don’t normally do a whole lot of post processing with my photos, preferring them to come from the camera, but I was curious as word spread about a new creative plug in for graphics programs, such as Photoshop. It’s name is Topaz Adjust, from Topaz Labs. Among the artistic effects you can choose are exposure, color, noise and detail effects. While I haven’t really taken the time to “get to know” the program, I was able to whip out a couple of examples of what it can do in just five minutes.

Before

After

Before

After

The amount of the effects can be controlled easily by sliding bars located in the menus. In both photos, I decided to go for a more “artsy” look.

My one “beef” with the program is the speed – or should I say, lack of – in applying the filter to your image. But, the creators of the program are listening to the users and are working on ways to speed it up.

There are some nice explanatory videos put out by Topaz Labs on You Tube to help get you started, if you’re like just about everyone else and hate reading manuals.

At $99 (on sale until Sept. 1 for $39), Topaz Adjust looks to be a great alternative to Lucis Art’s new version 6 at $595.

A great way to let your artistic side out to play!