Microsoft HD Photo : New Imaging File Format

Microsoft has announced HD Photo, a new file format for digital photography that offers higher image quality, greater preservation of data, and advanced features for current digital imaging applications.

“HD Photo offers compression with up to twice the efficiency of JPEG, with fewer damaging artifacts, resulting in higher-quality images that are one-half the file size. In addition, HD Photo offers increased image fidelity, preserving the entire original image content and enabling higher-quality exposure and color adjustments in the image. This new format offers the ability to decode only the information needed for any resolution or region, or the option to manipulate the image as compressed data.”

So how to increase the adoption of this new image format? Microsoft has released a set of HD Photo plugins for Adobe Photoshop software, which enable users to both read and write HD Photo files from within Adobe Photoshop software, and include support for high dynamic range pixel formats.

The HD Photo Device Porting Kit allows manufacturers to add HD Photo support in devices and to other platforms. HD Photo is natively supported in Windows Vista by a Windows Imaging Component (WIC) codec, and can be similarly supported in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 through a free WIC download. HD Photo is also included in Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0.

All these downloads are available at the Microsoft Download Cente. JPEG is a very popular image format, and reading about the much advanced features of HD Photo, it may be a matter of time that this format gains popularity…