Microsoft’s .jpg challenge
p2pnet.net news:- Bill and the Boys are looking to usurp the .jpg image format created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group.
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,” promises Microsoft.
“As a result, significantly smaller files can be created while still retaining optimum picture quality.”
But it’ll only be good for use with the CS2 or CS3 versions of Adobe Photoshop on Windows XP or Vista.
“Any other use is not supported,” says Microsoft, also saying the beta release of its new HD Photo file format plug-in, aka Windows Media Photo, will die on May 31, 2007.
It says features include:
- Multiple color formats for display or print
- Fixed or floating point high dynamic range image encoding
- Lossless or high quality lossy compression
- Extremely efficient decoding for multiple resolutions and sub-regions
- Minimal overhead for format conversion or transformations during decode
Microsoft is also providing the HD Photo Device Porting Kit 1.0 for implementing the still image codec on non-Windows platforms and devices.
Not only but also, “We changed the licensing terms to eliminate the previous very small royalties. We changed the name to a generic, un-trademarked term,” says Bill Crow’s HD Photo Blog. We’ve made the DPK available through a simple click-through End User License Agreement.
Now we’re taking the next big step. Our goal is to turn the format over to an appropriate standards organization. Ideally, this will include the publishing of an open specification, making possible to implement compatible encoders and decoders that are completely independent of Microsoft’s reference source code. This should fully address any concerns that have been raised about the option for open source implementations.”
Also See:
Microsoft – Microsoft Announces HD Photo, March 8, 2007
HD Photo Blog – Introducing HD Photo, March 11, 2007
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March 13th, 2007 at 4:03 am
This sounds a lot like JPEG2000, a format that blows away the traditional JPG format which has become so common place nowadays. I’m all for anything that improves on compression ratios while retaining maximum quality, and this new one sounds even better thanks to a lossless mode. Sadly, it likely won’t take off. Why? Firstly, it is by Microsoft. Even if it is good, people will probably avoid it for no other reason than the fact that they do not like Microsoft. None of their other formats (WMV, WMA, etc) have ever really taken off either, so this is another reason this new image format will probably end up being no different. JPEG2000 would have been great, and I’m actually surprised it didn’t do better considering how popular digital photography has become over the past decade. People shoot in RAW, showing they do care about retaining everything that makes it so great to use. The main problem that plagues JPEG2000 involves licensing I think (greed in other words), and I can see Microsoft making the same mistake. Plus in Photoshop it is really slow, especially with high resolution images. Hopefully someone in the field of open source will come up with a similar format one of these days. Just look at what FLAC has done for lossless music compression as an example. I have no doubt something freely available for public use that did everything Microsoft’s new format is promising would take off quickly, becoming the new default format everyone uses.