Corel Announces Free RAW Conversion Tool

If you are a user of Corel PHOTO-PAINT and you're frustrated at the lack of a tool that converts digital camera RAW format images, be frustrated no longer. Corel has announced the free availability of Pixmantec RawShooter Essentials 2005. It works with a wide variety of RAW formats and converts them to TIF. You can do one at a time or batch process a whole series of files. It can be downloaded for free from Corel's Web site. I've not had time to give it a full test, but my initial test showed that it did a very good job in converting my Canon RAW files into TIF. The interface has me a bit frustrated but I haven't read the manual yet. Yes, a PDF manual is included. I'd also like it to support PNG format in addition to TIF. But it is free and that is definitely nitpicking on my part.