South Carolina Photography Guild

In a letter to it’s former customers, Pixmantic has announced that anyone who had purchased their raw conversion software, Rawshooter Premium, is eligible for a free version of Adobe Lightroom 1.0, provided you made the purchase before July 12, 2006 (yesterday).  A very generous and benevolent gesture, but my question is:  what about those that purchased Pixmantic for Windows (Lightroom is only available for Macintosh computers)?  The full text of the email they sent follows:

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

Canon announced the debut of four new Pixma “All-in-one” printers the other day. The new members of the Pixma family include a PixmA MP460 (retail price of $129.99), the Pixma MP180 ($99), the Pixma MP160 ($89), and the Pixma MP530 ($199.99). The press release covers brief bios for each model and can be found here:
Canon Press Release

While improvements in ink usage and lower cost per page are always welcome for photographers, none of these add the larger print functionality, with each maxing out at 8.5×11. This is somewhat disappointing as advances in other areas of technology (building computers, setting up home networks, music recording, video recording, web publishing, etc., etc., etc.) are allowing the consumer to venture into new areas, the area of large printing capabilities are still somewhat restrictive. Epson has made some strides with their Epson 1280, which can be found retail for $399 with rebates knocking it down under $300, but this is the exception rather than the norm. The comparable Canon is the i9900, retails for $499 and does not have the same recognition in the print world. Canon has always been known as a camera manufacturer and is what they’ve built their name on. While adding the printer field into their product line does make sense, it would be nice to see them make their product more affordable, especially when the leader (Epson) has comparables that sell for lower costs.

Additionally, for new prosumers who have already dropped a bundle on their camera gear, price becomes a very limiting factor in new gear unless one is independantly wealthy or can instantly begin generating revenue from their endeavors. Ultimately what this comes down to is a question of whether photographers wish to take control of their printing and dig deep to spring for the higher end printers, or…do we continue to outsource our printing solutions to local and online print labs? For the time being, it seems larger sized printing shall remain within the confines of dedicated print labs both of the online and brick-and-mortar venues for entry level prosumers.

Somehow I missed this, but the AP reported a few days ago that Catherine Leroy, a famous war photojournalist from the Vietnam era has passed away after a bout with cancer in Santa Monica, CA. Their story on it can be found here:

AP News Wire - Catherine Leroy