Didn't used my old windows partition for quite some time now. But I had a bunch of photographs in my cameras (Canon 350D) RAW format lying around unprocessed and waiting for virtual processing.

This is this comparison of Linux RAW processing software which I had a look at and tried out nearly all of them. The most promising solution KDE digiKam is a) awkward to use, b) doesn't work on network shares (file locking problems), c) has a database backend which i don't like and worst of all d) doesn't do non-destructive editing. The next best candidate RAW Studio is not bad, but misses alot of basic features (eg. white balance profiles). I also tried uf UFRaw, but this one doesn't feature batch processing of images. So I came down to try out the closed source alternatives. LightZone seemed very very sexy - it's free (as in beer) for Linux and has this neat light zoning feature. But it requires a SSE2-able CPU, which I don't have attached to my Nokia monitor (which is very valuable for digital photography processing).

So the last thing i tried was Bibble Pro (4.9.9b) , which is also closed source but written with Qt and therefore runs on Linux. It has a 14day trial version, which I'm currently running. It has EVERYTHING you want, very high quality filters and I'm surprised what it can do with average pictures. I learned alot about digital processing white playing around with it.

The best thing is, it features a plugin interface where developers can link into the internal processing pipeline. There is a wide range of (beer-)free and commercial plugins for everything a photographer wants.

Ah, and it's damned fast. Installation was easy - there is a Debian .deb packaged which installed fine under Kubuntu 7.10,

I really think about buying a registration key, 13 days left, already think I will do it. Here's a sample of what it can do.