Getty Images has acquired London-based Digital Vision, a royalty-free photography business, for $165 million in cash. The majority of Digital Vision's current image collection already is available at gettyimages.com through Getty Images' Image Partner program. The company expects to increase investment in Digital Vision content to broaden the collection in terms of number of images, depth and geography.

Getty also announced a one-year partnership with PicScout, a provider of infringement detection software. The agreement allows Getty to use PicScout's Image Tracker Service on all of its 450,000 rights-managed images, including those that already have been licensed. PicScout will send reports of online infringements...

The OpenRAW Working Group has launched a new website, OpenRAW.com, to advocate for open, documented digital-camera data formats. The goal of OpenRAW, as stated on the website, is "to encourage image preservation and give creative choice of how images are processed to the creators of the images."

Virtually all digital cameras store the raw image data in a proprietary file format. In the brief history of digital photography, digital camera manufacturers have dropped support for asset management applications, abandoned settings from older RAW processor versions and changed the methods of storing basic camera settings...

Adobe Systems Inc. recently announced several new digital camera software upgrades, including the release of its Creative Suite software and a new version of Adobe Photoshop CS.

The new release, dubbed CS2, is a major upgrade to the entire suite and includes new versions of InDesign, Illustrator, and GoLive, as well as two new products: Version Cue and Adobe Bridge. The Creative Suite Premium Edition includes Photoshop CS2, InDesign CS2, Illustrator CS2, GoLive CS2, Version Cue CS2 and Acrobat 7.0.

Adobe also recently announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Macromedia in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen will continue as CEO, and Stephen Elop, Macromedia's president and CEO, will become president of worldwide field operations for Adobe. According to Adobe, the purchase of Macromedia will provide customers...

In late December, Canadian news outlets, including CFCN TV, the Calgary Herald, and Global News, ran photographs that were purportedly of the recent tsunami disaster in south Asia. The photos had been supplied by the World Job and Food Bank, based in Calgary. On Dec. 31, 2004, the Herald ran a front-page apology for its error in printing one of these photographs.

The media had been told incorrectly that the photo, along with others provided by the food bank, was from the recent tsunami, the apology explained. The image in the photograph actually was a huge wave resulting from a September 2002 tidal surge...

Associate editor Chris Johns has been appointed editor in chief of National Geographic magazine, succeeding William L. Allen, who retired at the end of the year. Johns, whose photographs began appearing in the magazine in 1985, is the ninth full-time editor in the society's 116-year history.

Johns began making changes almost immediately, combining the photography and illustration departments. Dennis Dimick, illustration editor, will head the new department and has been named associate editor for illustrations. The director of photography position was eliminated; Kent Kobersteen, who had held that title since 1998, left the magazine...