HD Photo plug

Released for Photoshop

Microsoft Download: HD Photo Plug-in for Adobe Photoshop Software

"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.

'With HD Photo, we're taking a new approach to creating and editing photos that simply isn't available to photographers with today's formats,' said Amir Majidimehr, corporate vice president of the Consumer Media Technology Group at Microsoft. 'HD Photo fully preserves the original image fidelity with high dynamic range while still allowing for significant improvement in compression size.'

In addition, HD Photo offers both lossless and lossy image compression, and can retain the full dynamic range and color gamut data from a camera's sensor. Also, because making adjustments to common color balance and exposure settings won't discard or truncate data as other common bitmap formats typically do, it's easier to "undo" those changes at a later time. As a result, significantly smaller files can be created while still retaining optimum picture quality."

Press Release

CNet - Vista to give HD Photo format more exposure

"HD Photo is a new file format for continuous-tone still images that surpasses the limitations of existing image formats. HD Photo supports a wide range of features including:

• Multiple color formats for display or print
  
• Fixed or floating point high-dynamic-range image encoding
  
• Lossless or high-quality lossy compression
  
• Efficient decoding for multiple resolutions and subregions
  
• Minimal overhead for format conversion or transformations during decode

HD Photo delivers a lightweight, high performance algorithm with a small memory footprint that enables practical, in-device encoding and decoding. It delivers compression quality comparable with JPEG-2000 and more than twice the quality of JPEG."

Bill Crow's HD Photo Blog