Last week at PMA, Microsoft formally announced HD Photo. For more information on HD Photo, head over to Bill Crow’s blog. The official press release can be found here. Here’s a summary of the important details:
- Microsoft is announcing HD Photo, a new format for end-to-end digital photography which offers higher image quality, greater preservation of data, and advanced features for today’s digital imaging applications
- The HD Photo Device Porting Kit, used to implement HD Photo in devices and other platforms
- Royalty free licensing
- A free set of HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop, developed in conjunction with Adobe
- Microsoft is committed to standardizing the HD Photo technology
HD Photo overview & details:
- A new format for end-to-end digital photography which offers higher image quality, greater preservation of data, and advanced features for today’s digital imaging applications
- Key benefits include:
- Better Image Fidelity: Preserving all the original image content, enabling the highest quality exposure and color adjustments
- State of the art compression: Up to twice the efficiency of JPEG with fewer damaging artifacts, and scalable to lossless
- Powerful Features: Decode only the information needed for any resolution or region, or manipulate the image as compressed data
- Technical Details
- Support for the Widest Range of Pixel Formats
- High Performance, Low Footprint Algorithm
- Advanced Decoding and Transformation Operations
- Better image quality in a file that is up to ½ the size of JPEG
- Lossless and lossy compression with the same algorithm
- Lossy compression is much less destructive than JPEG
- An efficient, portable photo interchange format that preserves the entire dynamic range
- HD Photo Support in Microsoft products:
- Windows Vista in-box support
- Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 support via Windows Imaging Component (WIC), a free download
- Windows Imaging Component (WIC)
- HD Photo Device Porting Kit
- NET Framework 3.0
- XML Paper Specification (XPS) – The XPS format utilizes the HD Photo format to store image data
- Photo Info Power Toy
- Microsoft Expression Family
- HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop
