Adobe acquires Pixmantec technology assets – what does this mean?
Adobe Systems Inc. announced yesterday that it has acquired the technology assets of Pixmantec ApS, makers of digital imaging software RawShooter Essentials and RawShooter Premium.
I have to admit that I never liked Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). It was always my second choice for converting my Canon raw files. Yes, it did a great job on highlight recovery. However, the usabiltiy was poor and the output not as good as Bibble. You get it for free if you have a license for Adobe Photoshop CS2. As with most things in life, you get what you pay for.
In ACR, the default setting is to apply exposure, shadow, brightness and contrast auto-processing when any image is opened. It almost always made the image worse. Then you have to turn off four auto check boxes and start again. You have to do this each time an image is imported for processing. Who at Adobe thought of that feature? Why wasn’t it ever changed? OK, you can change the default setting. However, as Michael Reichman points out in his recent article: “The gottcha is that Save New Camera Raw Defaults only applies to the camera model that was being used when this menu item was selected.” You need to remember to save the defaults for each camera. So much for that, let’s move on.
I did a number of comparisons of ACR with Bibble Pro (you can do you own). And, in my humble opinion the tiffs/jpegs outputed from Bibble have a better, cleaner look. Evidently, Adobe doesn’t think much of ACR either because they are killing it in favor of a new application called ‘Lightroom‘. It’s quite clear that Pixmantec’s RawShooter engine will become the conversion engine for Lightroom. Pixmantec RawShooter Premium product is being discontinued right away while the free RawShooter Essentials will continue to be available until the Lightroom public beta program is completed. Right now, Lightroom beta is available only for the Macintosh platform. A Windows beta version is due out soon.
If you read the news discussion forum thread on dpreview.com, it is clear that RawShooter has a lot a fans who are not happy about the acquisition. It is not clear at this point whether or not there will be a free version of Lightroom. I doubt it! For now, I will stick will Bibble Pro. Early reviews of Lightroom are quite positive, however.
Addendum: Bibble Labs Inc. has just issued a Press Release offering registered users of RawShooter Premium a US$30 discount toward the purchase of Bibble Pro 4.8 bring the price down to US$99.95.
Too right that RawShooter fans are not happy – largely in my case because neither company has bothered to contact me to explain the acquisition or why they are withdrawing support for a product I paid for very recently.