Found via .i dream in red., and reported by dpreview – Adobe has purchased Pixmantec, the provider of my favourite RAW processing software.
I’m annoyed. I’m a paying customer and user of RawShooter Premium, which Adobe are discontinuing. Pixmantec haven’t contacted me with this information, I’ve found out about it from weblogs.
My fellow users are also annoyed.
Gaaah! I don’t want Adobe LightRoom. I’d like to expect a free upgrade anyway, but given the rumoured price, and what I paid for the excellent RSP, I doubt that will happen.
This is possibly the best reason for using open source software. If you scale up the importance of the software a little then it becomes incredibly difficult to live without it, so you are stuck on an old version. Here you will probably learn to use something else, and sooner or later find something that is as good or better, but wouldnt it be nice to know that nobody can ever deny you the few quality pieces of software that really make your life easier. If you had the source you could always fix any bugs (or hire someone to fix them for you) that were found (or make changes for the next OS you will upgrade to). Then you would never have to suffer the pain of switching to inferior software just to do something you used to be able to do
I have no problem with that statement.
If there was a RAW processing solution as wonderful as RSP that was OSS, I would use it, in an instant. The fact is that the best that exists in OSS is dcraw, which is basically a command-line tool / library for converting from RAW to other formats. It doesn’t provide any of the funky workflow that RSP does.
Gimp doesn’t do what I need in this case, although I use it for all other image processing.
*sigh*
[…] an Open Source solution for RAW processing would be far better than being reliant on a commercial product. I couldn’t agree more, especially after having been burned like this. […]
[…] I was gutted when I learned that Adobe had bought Pixmantec. The disappointment turned to frustration and anger when both Adobe and Pixmantec failed to contact existing customers to explain what would happen. Eventually they did, and announced that we would be entitled to a copy of Adobe Lightroom when it became available. Shortly afterwards, the Windows beta was released. I quickly downloaded and installed it, but found that I was so used to working in RSP that the Lightroom interface took a lot of getting used to. […]