Bibble Labs who make the multi-platform raw conversion software Bibble were recently purchased by Corel. A post in the Bibble forums informs users an official announcement will be made at CES next week.

Bibble was the first alternative photographers had to the expensive and/or limited raw conversion software available from camera manufacturers. I began using Bibble in 2000 to work on Nikon D1 NEF proprietary raw files instead of Nikon Capture – which was ten times the price and far slower. Later I was invited to be an alpha tester for Bibble.

Bibble introduced batch processing, a Photoshop plugin and continues to be the fastest in sheer conversion times. Bibble is the name of the cat of founder Eric Hyman and a photo of it can be seen in the software.

Eric is a passionate photographer who had to purchase every camera model to reverse engineer the raw file formats. Over the past few years Eric has also worked with Microsoft and recently became the XBox 360 Development Manager.

While Corel have plans to continue Bibble, perhaps under a different name, as an independent raw processing application Bibble will be missed.