HD Photo to become JPEG XR

A new attempt to provide a higher-end sequel to the ubiquitous JPEG image standard is officially under way.

The multiple countries participating in the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which created the JPEG standard, have approved an effort to make Microsoft's HD Photo format a standard called JPEG XR, said Bill Crow, who has led Microsoft's HD Photo effort and who just took over the company's Microsoft Live Labs Seadragon imaging project. XR stands for "extended range," a reference to the format's ability to show a wider and finer range of tonal gradations and a richer color palette.

"The country vote is done, and it passed," Crow said. "That means the International JPEG committee has decided to go ahead and create the standard. Now it's just a process of doing that work," a process that will begin later this month in a meeting in Kobe, Japan.

The move is an important step in the transformation of the photo format from an in-house technology called Windows Media Photo to a neutral format more likely to be palatable to companies that don't want to be beholden to Microsoft.

However, the move also means that Microsoft will have to be more patient with its hopes to get HD Photo to catch on more broadly. Standardization "typically takes around a year," Crow said.

The wait is worth it, said Josh Weisberg, director of digital imaging evangelism for Microsoft's Rich Media Group.

"As much as I would love to have more support for it, I think it's logical for people to wait for there to be a standardized version of it," he said. "If we weren't going through the standardization process, we'd be pushing much harder for people to support it."

In Microsoft's view, HD Photo also offers better compression and support for in-camera image processing. It's built into Windows Vista, but Microsoft offers the software development kit to implement the technology free and with no royalty constraints. Image-editing powerhouse Adobe Systems has voiced support for the format.

[Renegade Knight]

Do it right.

If it's going to be a new standard they need to do it right.
No royalties and a Lossless ability.

[`WarpKat]

Don't forget...

...the votes. MS CAN NOT buy the votes like they did in the OOXML debacle.

MS only did that because they saw a losing battle. They should let the documents speak for themselves and abstain from imposing royalties against anyone using it. Of they do, it will prove all along what everyone has been saying.

[ewelch]

JPEG 2000 all over again

As long as Microsoft realizes that serious photographers are not
going to adopt this format, they might have a chance of
succeeding. RAW is for serious photographers. Anything less is
not going to cut it. As the tools make it easier to manage RAW
files, there is less need for handling the masses of files a
photographers has in multiple formats. No need to shoot
RAW+Jpeg.

Of course, somehow this is no doubt an effort on Microsoft's
part to weasel their way in to photographers workflows. And
there isn't much hope of that unless there are zero strings
attached to using the format by anyone. The first lawsuit they
file against a competitor and it's death for the format.

[Joe Real]

As long as there's no royalty pain.

I'm all for it, provided I'm not paying anyone for using it.

[inetdog]

HD is more than RAW and less than RAW at the same time.

As I understand it, although the proposed new HD format does not contain as much information about a single exposure than the RAW format, it can in fact hold more information that a single RAW about the subject being photographed.

I do not know whether HD will try to preserve any metadata which may be contained in a RAW image from the camera, but it sounds like an HD image can be composited from two or more RAW exposures of the same subject. For example, if the camera takes two captures in quick succession with different "shutter speeds", there can be more bits allocated to the subtle differences in tone within the darker portions of the long exposure while the tone differentiations of the highlights can come from the shorter exposure which does not saturate at the brightest pixels.
So one might indeed ask whether a professional photographer would rather work with two different RAW images or a single compressed image which has been constructed, in a non-linear way, from the same two exposures.
As a consumer, I would rather that the end result which I view on my computer be the latter, regardless of whether it was produced by the camera or by the photographer. The photographer may be able to do a more realistic or artistic job of producing the final result, but that final result could be more accurately transmitted to me as HD than as a conventional JPEG, lossless or not.

[ward459]

Rumor from an insider

I heard from a MS employee that this format is half the size of jPEG when compressed to the same resolution. If this is true, it will hopefully get broad support from the industry, and browser publishers.

[akayanni]

Why

Why did we need another format? JPG 2000 is great, I just wouldn't be game to use it. Support is just too patchy. PNG is great too but for the file sizes.

What's been needed for sometime is a format with transparency that doesn't blow file sizes to hell.

Will XR support transparency?

Yani

[thomul]

This may show my naivete, but would this be a firmware update?