Microsoft works with Adobe on HD Photo 'Photoshop' plugin

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 08 March 2007 16:35

Your IT - Entertainment

A new ‘HD’ photo standard that’s twice as efficient as JPEG has been previously unveiled by Microsoft and is even built into Vista – now Microsoft releases an HD Photo plugin for Photoshop.

Although news of Microsoft’s HD Photo format has previously been discussed in the tech media, Microsoft took the opportunity to formally announce the new high-def photo format at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) 07 International Convention and Trade Show in Las Vegas, the annual show that’s all about digital photography.

HD Photo is a new file format for “end-to-end digital photography” that offers photographers a higher image quality, greater preservation of data, and advanced features for today's digital-imaging applications.

Not only has Microsoft announced an HD Photo plugin for Adobe’s Photoshop (both the CS2 and the upcoming CS3 version to be announced on March 27), Microsoft is expecting that digital camera manufacturers will incorporate saving photos directly to HD Photo format, instead of JPEG, within the next 12-18 months.

The format is built into Windows Vista and is called Windows Media Photo, but Microsoft has decided to rename the format and offer much better licensing conditions in an attempt to make it a global standard found in cameras and photo editing software, and as such is in the process of submitting the HD Photo format to the appropriate standards organization.

As a next-gen digital image format, Microsoft says it’s an excellent solution for digital image storage and editing, offering better compress with ‘up to’ twice the efficiency of JPEG. They promise ‘fewer damaging artifacts’, meaning better image quality, with images that are half the size of their JPEG equivalents.

HD Photo will also preserve the original image content, letting users have higher quality exposures and color adjustments, with the image being able to decode only the information needed for any resolution or region, or the option to manipulate the image as compressed data.

At the PMA event, Amir Majidimehr, the corporate VP of Consumer Media Technology at Microsoft was on hand to give his comments. He said that “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. HD Photo fully preserves the original image fidelity with high dynamic range while still allowing for significant improvement in compression size.”

Thankfully, HD Photo offers two types of image compression – both lossless and lossy, and has the ability to retain the full dynamic range and color gamut data from a camera’s sensor, making a truly next-gen photo format. Because editing an HD photo won’t ‘lose’ data as is common with other photo formats, ‘undo-ing’ changes to get back to the original photo is easy. What this results in is much smaller files while still delivering excellent picture quality.

So, now that we know what the new HD Photo format is all about, what about the Adobe Photoshop plugin that Microsoft released at the PMA? Please read onto page 2 to find out about it, where to download it free of charge, and for the conclusion!