[Steve]

Further information about the Adobe purchase of Pixmantec assets from the Adobe press release

Q: Why has Adobe acquired Pixmantec?
A: One of the great advantages of working with raw images is that, as the technology for raw processing continues to improve, the quality you can bring out of even your older images continues to improve as well. It is for this reason that Adobe continues to invest in our own raw processing technology. The acquisition of Pixmantec will allow Adobe to accelerate our rate of improvement and sets us up to deliver the world’s best raw processing solutions. Combining the best of Adobe’s existing raw technology with the best of Pixmantec’s technology will deliver noticeable improvements to photographers. More importantly, the expertise of Pixmantec founders Kenneth Tang Laerke and Michael Jonsson—developed through their work creating the RawShooter products as well as through their work on Capture One software—will be a great complement to our own expertise and promises substantial technology advances in the future.

Q: What are the plans for the RawShooter line of products?
A: The RawShooter | Premium product will be taken off the market as soon as
existing obligations with distribution partners are fulfilled. Special pricing that will make it easier for RawShooter | Premium customers to migrate to other Adobe products will be announced shortly. The free RawShooter | Essentials product will remain available as a download from the Adobe Web site until shortly after Lightroom 1.0 is released as a shipping product.

Q: Why does Adobe plan to discontinue the RawShooter products?
A: Pixmantec has strong technology which has significant value for making Adobe’s own raw processing solutions better. Adobe already offers multiple workflows for processing raw images. The new Adobe Lightroom software—currently in public beta for Mac and soon available for Windows—provides a photography-centric environment that will handle the full workflow from import, sorting, developing, and storage, through to presentation and output. The Raw Shooter products do not offer any significant functionality that is not already, or will not be shortly, offered
in Lightroom, so continuing this product line would only cause confusion for our customers.

Q: What level of support will Adobe provide for existing RawShooter customers?
A: Pixmantec’s primary customer support offering has been an online forum where customers can post questions to be answered by other customers or by Pixmantec staff. We will migrate these forums to the user-to-user forums on Adobe.com

Q: Lightroom is currently available only for the Mac platform, and RawShooter is available on Windows. Do you plan to turn RawShooter into your Windows version of Lightroom?
A: No. Our Windows version of Lightroom is already well under development
and will be available as a public beta shortly. We will be taking the best technology in RawShooter and incorporating it into both the Mac and Windows versions of Lightroom.

Q: Will Adobe continue to provide camera compatibility updates for the RawShooter products?
A: No, because these products will be discontinued, we will not be focusing our efforts on any updates.

Q: After the discontinuation of the RawShooter products, which Adobe product will be the right choice for RawShooter customers?
A: Of course, customers can continue to use the existing RawShooter products for as long as they like, but they may want to move to another product to gain compatibility with raw formats from future cameras. The most appropriate Adobe product for RawShooter users will be Adobe Lightroom, because it provides efficient raw processing within a photography-centric environment.