News: Microsoft unveils HD Photo photo file format

HD is a shortened form of the term HDRI - High Dynamic Range Image. Read more about HDRI.


Microsoft today formally announced HD Photo, a new file format for end-to-end digital photography, which it claims offers higher image quality, greater preservation of data, and advanced features for today's digital-imaging applications. Previously known as Windows Media Photo, the Redmond-based company says that the digital image format is designed for digital photography on devices, applications and services; it 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, Microsoft claims. The announcement was made at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) '07 International Convention and Trade Show in Las Vegas.

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. The new format offers also the ability to decode only the information needed for any resolution or region, or the option to manipulate the image as compressed data.

"With support on popular platforms such as Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X, HD Photo will allow consumers to easily view, edit and share images without conversion or special applications," the company said. "The format also allows for flexible metadata handling and supports industry-standard metadata formats."

"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.

HD Photo in Photoshop, Vista

Microsoft also announced the beta release of a set of HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop software, developed with the help of Adobe. The plug-ins 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 plug-ins support both the CS3 and CS2 versions of Adobe Photoshop software, and will be available for Windows Vista and Windows XP, as well as Mac OS X (Universal Binary). A beta version of the Windows plug-in is available today for download at the Microsoft Download Center. Microsoft expects to release finished plug-ins, which will be free of charge, in approximately 60 days. The HD Photo Device Porting Kit is also available for download at the Microsoft Download Center, allowing manufacturers to add HD Photo support in devices and to other platforms.

Microsoft said that 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. Microsoft said that it intends to standardize the technology and will be submitting HD Photo to an appropriate standards organization shortly.