Richard Williams Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060626/20060626005231.html 'Adobe...today announced it has acquired the technology assets of PixmantecApS...Adobe plans to integrate Pixmantec raw processing technologies intoLightroom and wherever customers will be working with raw files. Inpreparation for this integration, the Pixmantec RawShooter Premium product isbeing discontinued, though the free RawShooter Essentials product will continueto be available until the Lightroom public beta program is completed.' Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em, put 'em out of business and make their customers buy your products. Nothing succeds like a monopoly...ask Microsoft... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KenPapai Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 Adobe has WAY beat Pixmantec to the game already. Adobe Photoshop is the gold standard, just like Autodesk is for drafting professionals, pretty much mission critical software built for pros, tested by pros, and recommended by pros. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Williams Posted June 26, 2006 Author Share Posted June 26, 2006 ...while also screwing your main competitor in the budget image editor market (RSE was the raw converter bundled with Paint Shop Pro X). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 Hey, if you can screw Corel (who bought out JASC for Paint Shop Pro) while gouging your potential customers at the same time, why miss the opportunity... Picture Windows Pro is just about the only "little guy" left in the image editing area. Vesion 4 has built in RAW support but I don't know how extensive it is. Time to go see if they have a trial version available I trhink. Can Bibble have long left to live in the RAW converter business? I'd grab RawShooter essentials right now (free download) before Big Brother decides to pull it early. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Williams Posted June 26, 2006 Author Share Posted June 26, 2006 'Adobe Photoshop is the gold standard, just like Autodesk is for drafting professionals, pretty much mission critical software built for pros, tested by pros, and recommended by pros.' I don't think that applies to Adobe Camera Raw though - a lot of people just use it because it's bundled and well integrated with Photoshop. And it remains to be seen how Lightroom will do (probably better now they've eliminated a significant competitor!). There's some more info on the Pixmatec website: http://www.pixmantec.com/pdf/press_releases/AdobeFAQ-Pixmantec.pdf which implies that Adobe has hired the RawShooter developers, and that they saw RawShooter as a competitor to Lightroom. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Williams Posted June 26, 2006 Author Share Posted June 26, 2006 'I'd grab RawShooter essentials right now (free download) before Big Brother decides to pull it early.' I'd suggest installing and registering it too, or you may be stuck with a nag screen (assuming it even functions without registration - I doubt Adobe will keep the registration servers alive for long). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JosvanEekelen Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 Resistance is futile. But remember that even in the times of the Roman Empire there was a small village in Gaus that resisted the Romans. For those not familiar with the not so recent history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix But on a more serious note: Lightroom will probably like most Adobe programs take forever to open, use too many system resources and cost an arm and a leg. For the moment RSP will still work but newer cameras will not be supported. I guess it is time for an open source Raw processor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 Dcraw (http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/) is open source. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Williams Posted June 26, 2006 Author Share Posted June 26, 2006 'I guess it is time for an open source Raw processor.' There's dcraw, of course, and various GUI versions like UFRaw and RawStudio: http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/ http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/ http://rawstudio.org/ But nothing I'm aware of that approaches RawShooter's excellent browser workflow. Nice conversion quality, though (I actually prefer the UFRaw output to what I get with RSE from Nikon files). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ted_marcus1 Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 Based on the FAQ, which pushes the still-unreleased Lightroom as their "photography-centric" solution, I wonder whether that means they will discontinue Adobe Camera Raw and then "invite" Photoshop users to purchase Lightroom if they want raw capability. That sounds like an excellent strategy to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 UFraw is also open source, and despite being designed for linux and GIMP, can be run as a standalone Windows application with a decent GUI. Of course it doesn't have all the fancy integration of commercial software. Then there's the camera maker's software. Canon's DPP does a pretty good job for free. Still, there's a mentality out there that if you don't have all the latest Adobe bloatware you're not a real phonographer, so I'm sure sales of PhotoShop and LightRoom will continue to rise and eventually Adobe will own everything in the graphics world except Apple and Microsoft Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iainkirk Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 Essentially Adobe have consumed another product they knew was a threat... Yes Photoshop is the standard; however it is expensive, needs a veritable mountain of resources to work properly, is beset with annoying piffle and Adobe KNOW they have many of us by the veritable "short & curlies" I'm sure the chaps who developed RS are happy with the pay-off mind... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zee Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 I guess after they got the green light to swallow up Macromedia, they felt there was nothing stopping them from eliminating the rest of their competition. Shameful tactics, really. Who's left? Corel? When that happens, we'll be really and truly screwed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 I think PhotoShop is WAY overkill for 95% of the photographers here. Sure, there are some who need it and can fully use it, but there are others who can't really afford it, don't really need it, but who think they simply have to have it because it's "the best" or "the standard" or whatever. For a large number of photographers much cheaper, easier to use, faster, less bloated image editors like Paint Shop Pro and Picture Windows Pro are absolutely fine and about 1/5 the cost. There's an attitude of "I must have Photoshop to get the most out of my images" and that simply isn't true. Photoshop continues to get bigger, slower, more resource consuming and more expensive with each new version. It's the Hummer H1 of the image editing world. A $125,000 SUV that gives single digit gas mileage getting the kids to soccer practice! We don't all need one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobmichaels Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 Simple solution: buy Adobe stock. Symbol is ADBE, closed today at $30.69. If you beleive they are taking over the world, make too much profit, yadda yadda, then own some of the action and get even. You don't have to like their products. You don't have to use their products. That's your choice. But don't bitch about their success when you had a chance to participate but didn't. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 The other question I have is why did Adobe buy out Pixmantec? Adobe doesn't really need a RAW converter. They probably have thousands of man hours invested in their own RAW conversion utilities and by all accounts they work quite well. It's not like RawShooter had technology they didn't already have in house. Could it just be that they saw a potential competitor to Lightroom, so they simply wanted to kill it off? No real advantage to the end user except to remove an option for them not to choose the Adobe product. I really can't see any other reason for Adobe to buy them up and close them down. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zee Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 Bob Michaels, I think you're missing the point. Noone here is bitching about or bemoaning Adobe's success. On the contrary, we're dismayed by their insatiable need to swallow up their competitors rather than compete on a level playing field. Why not let their products determine their position in the industry? Don't they believe in a free market economy? If GoLive and Illustrator and Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom, etc are so great, then why not let them compete on their own merits? Photoshop is my image editor of choice, but I can still recognize the unfairness of one company exercising monopolistic control over the entire market. Lack of competition is not a good thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stb Posted June 27, 2006 Share Posted June 27, 2006 My guess is Adobe was very unpleasantly surprised by Aperture 1.1. I don't think anyone (me included) expected Apple to be that good that quickly on raw develoment, arguably better than ACR itself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
david_gonzalez Posted June 27, 2006 Share Posted June 27, 2006 Maybe a bit off topic, but if Adobe is waiting for Vista code from MS before compiling a Windows Beta, and with the state of Vista right now, doesn't that give them a lot of time to incorporate the RS tech into the next beta? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bill downey Posted June 27, 2006 Share Posted June 27, 2006 As of 5 minutes ago I was able to buy Rawshooter Premium at the Pixmantec site for $99. It was on special- $59 a few weeks ago. Oh well. Bill Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brad_ Posted June 27, 2006 Share Posted June 27, 2006 And, for completeness, I'm not particularly wild about Microsoft acquiring iView... www.citysnaps.net Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joseph_wisniewski Posted June 27, 2006 Share Posted June 27, 2006 Ken Papai - "Adobe Photoshop is the gold standard, just like Autodesk is for drafting professionals, pretty much mission critical software built for pros, tested by pros, and recommended by pros." Adobe is very much like Autodesk. I remember the time Autodesk bought and buried GeneriCAD, a program that matched (and in many ways beat) AutoCAD) at about 1/10 the price. As far as built, tested, and recommended, that's hobson's choice. Neither AutoCAD nor PhotoShop exactly gets high marks for reliability or interface ergonomics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joseph_wisniewski Posted June 27, 2006 Share Posted June 27, 2006 Richard Williams - "Adobe of Borg assimilates RawShooter" Incorrect. Iliah Borg is associated neither with Adobe nor Pixmantic. He is the author of an entirely different raw processing program called Raw Magik. http://rawmagik.us Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EricM Posted June 28, 2006 Share Posted June 28, 2006 "Perhaps they know something we don't?" that hardly anyone will be shooting jpg's anymore? all the little fish are being gobbled up... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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