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Adobe has made an official announcement about the future of RawShooter after they bought developers Pixmantec a few weeks ago. As feared, and expected, it is the end of the RawShooter line. RawShooter Premium is discontinued and no longer for sale, and the free Essentials product will be available until Lightroom is released - until then it can downloaded from Adobe's website. Because the products are now discontinued, Adobe will not be providing any camera updates for forth-coming cameras, apart from the Canon EOS 30D for |Essentials.
There is good news for RawShooter Premium users however, as all customers will be offered a free download of Mac or PC Lightroom when it is released, despite the latter offering (by Adobe's own admission) different functionality and a higher price. This decision, and the Canon EOS 30D support, has mainly come about from opinions on the Pixmantec forums, proving people power really works and that the takeover isn't all bad news. The support forums will continue to be supported by Adobe until the products are totally phased out.
Adobe have decided to discontinue RawShooter because they don't offer any functionality that isn't covered by Lightroom or its other products, and Adobe has two RAW processors already - Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW. Pixmantec has mainly been acquired for the people behind it and the expertise they can bring to improving Adobe's RAW processing. Incidentally Adobe are trying their best to make an accurate conversion tool of Premium settings to its own processors as accurate as possible, so that all the effort RawShooter users have put into editing isn't lost.
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