Microsoft recently announced that their new HD Photo technology will be considered for JPEG standardization (see press release ). As with the new ECMA committee assembled to standardize Microsoft's XPS technology as a more widely used printing standard, the adoption of HD Photo as a standard image format will mostly likely increase its use for digital cameras and digital imaging applications.
HD Photo provides a number of key features, such as selectable compressed and uncompressed file modes and the ability to create images with a higher dynamic range. The format provides numerous color options for embedding ICC and new Microsoft's new WCS color profiles, supporting alpha channels and working with spot colors with an image. Being fully compatible with Microsoft's XPS e-doc format, users of HD Photo images gain the full benefit of saving and printing these images within a document without losing color and image reproduction quality.
Incorporating the new image format into digital cameras would bridge the gap between traditional JPEG images, which sacrifice file size for image quality, and RAW images, which maintain scene information at the expense of additional image and color processing. For Digital photographers currently creating HDR photos, the use of a compressed HD Photo file may be a worthwhile alternative to working with other 32 Bit image format options.
A number of companies offer tools for working with HD Photo technology. A cross platform Photoshop plug-ins for HD Photo is available from Pegasus Imaging (more...). QualityLogic provides a suite of HD Photo images to test this new format with printing and display systems (more...).
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