rawformat

RawShooter is dead, long live Lightroom

Pixmantic says "we will no longer be working on new versions of the RawShooter | premium product." They have announced that some purchasers of Rawshooter Premium can get a free version of Adobe Lightroom 1.0. Their letter to users is below:

Dear RawShooter!

As you may have noticed, Adobe Systems Inc. recently acquired the technology assets of Pixmantec. Pixmantec’s technology and expertise will be incorporated into Adobe’s products. Specifically, some of Pixmantec’s raw processing technology will be incorporated into Adobe’s raw processing engine which is shared by Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. We, the founders of Pixmantec, will join the Adobe team, integrating our expertise into their products, and continuing to be able to serve the photographic community.

As the founders of Pixmantec, we’d like to express how gratifying it has been to see the level of support and praise we have managed to gain through the introduction of the RawShooter product line to the market. We had a vision of making top-notch raw processing capabilities truly accessible to a wide audience of photographers, and the number of devoted users that developed tells us that we made significant progress towards that goal.

Nevertheless, we also saw that we were not the only company recognizing the need for specialized photography workflow software. Specifically, Adobe a company we have always admired had for some time been working on their own workflow solution, which was announced as the Lightroom public beta program in January of this year. When we met with the folks from Adobe, we found that the admiration was mutual, and that our visions for the customer were very well aligned. Ultimately, we saw the opportunity to make a bigger impact by joining Adobe, and lending our own best ideas and expertise to the ongoing Camera Raw and Lightroom efforts.

As we work to integrate Pixmantec technology and expertise into Adobe’s raw processing pipeline, we will no longer be working on new versions of the RawShooter | premium product, and have stopped selling this product. Of course, your RawShooter | premium product will continue to work and serve you well, but we also know that many of you will eventually want a software solution that you know will continue to evolve, remaining up-to-date as raw workflows and processing continues to improve. Adobe Lightroom is a product targeted at solving these evolving workflows and up to the minute raw processing. Currently in public beta format for the Macintosh platform Adobe Lightroom will be released as public beta for Windows this summer.

Lightroom is being built from the ground up to address the unique challenges of a photography-centric workflow. Not only will it offer what we believe will be second-to-none raw processing, but it is designed to provide a start-to-finish workflow solution for photographers. We encourage you to learn about Adobe Lightroom: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom

For those concerned about the transition to Lightroom or the acquisition in general please visit this FAQ that addresses many of the topics discussed in the Pixmantec forums recently. Please continue to let us know how we can ease this product transition for you.

Now that we’ve joined the Adobe family, we must emphasize that RawShooter users also are now Adobe customers, regardless of whether you ever purchase another Adobe product. Your satisfaction matters to us. Specifically, Adobe will do the following:


Offer a free download version of Lightroom 1.0 for customers who bought RawShooter | premium prior to July 12th 2006, 12 noon European Standard Time. Given that Lightroom 1.0 will serve a much broader range of functionality and will be priced at a higher price point than RawShooter | premium, we believe this represents a great value for our customers.


Adobe will investigate to what extent your image corrections made within RawShooter can be transferred to Lightroom.


We will deliver support for Canon EOS 30D In RawShooter | essentials this summer.

We are deeply thankful for the support you have offered Pixmantec and we thank you in advance for your understanding and continued support.

The best is yet to come!

Sincerely yours,

Kenneth Laerke and Michael Jonsson

Microsoft Pro Photo Summit Opener: Vista, Windows Photo Gallery, and Pro OS features

Here are my notes live as the presentation progresses. At the Pro Photo Summit in Redmond today, and Tim Gray (Director of Pro Photo Community) gave his welcome remarks. There are 350 or so attendees present, most are not from the Seattle area. Most have raised their hands in response to the question "how many are pro photographers?" and most also responded to the affirmative that they are Macintosh users as well. Most attendees were not from Seattle. MS research asserts that 52% of professional photographers use Windows.

One interesting note is that Microsoft produced a fun video featuring well-known Seattle TV and radio personality Pat Cashman. He asked people on the street pro-related questions such as favored rendering intents, and if they shoot RAW, etc. Most responded with befuddled looks.

Presenters admitted that XP has several weaknesses related to working with photos.

* No image editing
* No archiving
* Slow acquisition
* Poor searching
* No central library
* Slow rendering
* No Metadata Control
* Limited Workflow
* No RAW
* No integrated sharing

All are apparently addressed with Vista. MS wants to bridge the gap between consumer and pro users.

Vista Demo:
Insert a card and copy files, via the OS, tagging can be applied as while photos are imported. RAW support is built into the operating system, and all SLR manufacturers are building filters.

Comprehensive color management is also built into the OS.

Windows Photo Gallery:
Clearly targeted at the iPhoto space. It's slick looking, very fast when moving, tagging and performing edits.
* Some basic touchup tools, cropping, auto color, etc.
* Supports extensible contact sheet templates.
* Can send files to service partners for printing
* Photos can be shared on consumer DVD players using Windows DVD Maker.

DXO, ACR, Silkypix, Lightbox Raw Processing Compared

Daisuke Tomiyasu has processed and presented an image captured with a Canon EOS 1Ds Mk2 and converted using four popular Raw processors. Although his translation to english is imperfect, " Sometime too perfect then result is not as image what you want..." the images speak for themselves.

Iridient RAW Developer 1.5.1 vs. CaptureOne Pro 3.7.4

David Mantripp, a long time CaptureOne user has documented his own experience comparing RAW Developer and CaptureOne Pro in his post Switching to RAW Developer. One of the reasons he prefers RAW Developer is that it isn't designed to be a workflow tool and therefore he can use it "efficiently in tandem with iView MediaPro." Another is their support for Olympus cameras.

He concludes:

"I've been considering switching to RAW Developer for some time. Now that I've finally found a few hours to evaluate it, I've decided to do so. It's a great piece of software at a very fair price. I'm not saying that CaptureOne is no good. I've been using it happily for 2 years. But I doubt that PhaseOne sees much point in improving Olympus RAW performance for the tiny user base which all indications show they have."

You'll want to read the whole post, and see the image comparisons here.

Aperture 1.1 Ships: Now a Better Tool for Raw Shooters

Digital Outback reports on the new release of Aperture. There's a lot to like here. They say it "shows that Apple is carefully listening." Check out the entire review here.

The specifics regarding Raw:

"The raw conversion is now versioned in Aperture. That means if you have worked on images in Aperture 1.0 and like the results this update will not change the images you have done. But the new version 1.1 allows more control for your RAW files.

On a per image basis you can control:

* Contrast (mainly lower the contrast as 1.0 is the recommended default)
* Sharpening at the RAW conversion level
* Color Noise removal
* Auto Noise Compensation
* Because we mainly use low ISO images the "Auto Noise Compensation" did not show obvious changes in our tests. The other settings are clearly useful."

Digital Outback is a great site for keeping up on Raw developments.

Picture Arena 1.2 adds DNG support

Press release here:

Picture Arena 1.2 with DNG and RAW support, mail export, higher speed and numerous improvements

APRIL 22, 2005 - HERZOGENAURACH, GERMANY

IOSPIRIT GmbH today released an update to its integrated digital picture management software Picture Arena for MacOS® X offering sophisticated picture browsing, image-processing and presentation capabilities to version 1.2... (more)

Optimized Windows DCRaw executables for various processors and other great links

Benjamin Lebsanft has taken David Coffin's library and made optimized Windows executables for various processors.  There are some other great links and tools on his site.  Enjoy.

IrfanView adds DNG Support

Irfan Skiljan is a software developer in Bosnia, and he produces  IrfanView, which  (according to his site), "is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003."

He just updated the software on 4/22/2005 to include DNG as a supported format.

ProFoto Releases PFS Image Darkroom v1.71

ProFoto Software has updated their PFS Image Darkroom to version 1.71. PFS Image Darkroom is an image browser and RAW Conversion program for Canon EOS Raw images.

DNG ready Raw Developer 1.2 released

Iridient Digital have just released Raw Developer 1.2. This major update brings the support for many cameras, but also for the DNG format. Faster loading of image files, and a better demosaicing are some of the many new features and improvements of this Mac OS X raw images processor.

More info at: http://www.iridientdigital.com/

A free fully functionnal demo (with watermarking) is available.