Microsoft works with Adobe on HD Photo 'Photoshop' plugin

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

Your IT - Entertainment

Interestingly, Microsoft actually worked with Adobe on creating the HD Photo plugins for Photoshop which allow Photoshop to read and write HD Photo files, with the new beta plugin supporting both CS2 and CS3, whether running on XP, Vista, or Mac OS X (but only with the Universal Binary edition of Photoshop, meaning Mac users will need CS3 before they can take advantage of HD Photo).

Because the final version of CS3 for Mac isn’t here yet, the only beta version available is for Windows, and it can be downloaded from today onwards at Microsoft’s Download Center.

The software is set to leave beta status and emerge as fully completed versions within around 60 days, and will remain totally free of charge.

Microsoft has also made an ‘HD Photo Device Porting Kit’ for manufacturers to add HD Photo support into their devices, something that Microsoft is naturally actively encouraging as it seeks to make HD Photo the new photo standard.

HD Photo also allows for flexible metadata handling and supports industry-standard metadata formats, making HD Photo a true contender for the photo format of at least the next few years – until someone decides we need a ‘super high def’ photo format to replace it!