I came home from our trip with hundreds and hundreds of big (10 MB) RAW images on the portable hard drive that I bought for the trip. I can’t even view them on my computer without a program that recognizes them, much less save them as a web-friendly format. 

I first tried the software that came with the cameras: Olympus Master II.  This was not a success.  It’s extremely slow on my three-year-old, 1 GHz Apple laptop, and even if it weren’t for the speed issues, I had trouble getting results I wanted.  Cropping, adjusting tilt, selecting the level of software sharpening, noise reduction, white balance, and exposure were just too crude and too time-consuming. 

Adobe’s Lightroom application or Apple’s Aperture were the obvious choices, but a bit of research convinced me that Aperture would be far too slow, and that even Lightroom would be a problem on my current computer. 

I hunted around a bit and discovered “Bibble,” a well-regarded “digital darkroom” application that provides a good and reasonably quick way to do everything I need to do.  It’s relatively inexpensive, too, although that was not a major factor for me. 

I’ve been quite happy with Bibble, and most of the photos on these pages were processed with it.

NEXT: Overall assessment