Two interesting digital photography aquisitions

Both Adobe and Microsoft bolstered their digital imaging portfolio this week. Adobe bought Pixmantec and Microsoft bought iView Multimedia.

The Adobe aquisition is interesting to me. You see, Pixmantec had a product called RawShooter (Essentials or Pro) that was a RAW workflow engine. I beta tested and liked it, but I couldn’t see paying for it when I already had Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW. It had a nice workflow, but it also seemed a little “home grown” maybe. Just not as slick or professional looking as the Adobe products. It did have some pretty cool RAW processing techniques though, so it will be interesting to see how it’s integrated with the Adobe line. They say the technology may become part of Adobe Lightroom which is still in beta. We’ll see, but as an Adobe user, this makes me pretty happy overall.

The Microsoft one is a little more baffling to me. IView is basically a digital image cataloging program. I think it’s something that’s good for the Microsoft portfolio, but I think most people have always thought of IView as a Mac first, PC second kind of product. So, something so entrenched in the Mac world seems like a wierd target to me. It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out.