dSLR Dad

It has been a long time coming, and it happened with very little fanfare, but JPEG XR has officially become a standard:

JPEG XR (ISO/IEC 29199-2) is now an International Standard and also an ITU-T Recommendation (T.832). New work has been started to enable the use of JPEG XR image coding within the JPIP protocol, which allows interactive browsing of networked images. The Motion JPEG XR specification for support of video sequences is currently approaching the Final Committee Draft phase of the ISO/IEC approval process. WG 1 is pleased to note the successful completion of JPEG XR verification testing experiments for low dynamic range images.

Now I’m sure most of you are wondering: “What the heck is JPEG XR and why should I care?”  Well, to answer that question, you need a little bit of history…

(more…)

Microsoft has posted a complete version of the HD Photo plug-in for Photoshop CS3 and CS2.  Here are the separate downloads for Windows and OSX.  The same features are supported on both Windows and OSX.  The files created with either version are fully compatible with Windows Vista, Windows Live Photo Gallery, the HD Photo Device Porting Kit, and several other applications that support HD Photo.

Thanks to Bill Crow at Microsoft for the update.  You can listen to the This Week in Media Episode 51 in which he discussed the genesis of HD Photo and image compression.  Just absolutely fabulous stuff.

Microsoft’s HD Photo format has been picked by the Joint Photographic Experts Group to be a new standard called JPEG XR (XR is short for ‘extended range’). No matter what you may think of Microsoft, this is great news. Here is a description from Wikipedia:

HD Photo is an image codec that gives a high-dynamic-range image encoding while requiring only integer operations (with no divides) for both compression and decompression. It supports monochrome, RGB, CMYKRadiance. It may optionally include an embedded ICC color profile, to achieve consistent color representation across multiple devices. An alpha channel may be present for transparency, and Exif and XMP metadata formats are supported. The format allows decoding part of an image, without decoding the entire image. Full decoding is also unnecessary for certain operations such as cropping, downsampling, horizontal or vertical flips, or cardinal rotations.

All color representations are transformed to an internal color representation. The transformation is entirely reversible, so, by using appropriate quantizers, both lossy and lossless compression can be achieved.

I invite all you dSLR DAD’s to head over to Bill Crow’s blog over at Microsoft. As the project manager for HD Photo, he has posted some great information.

You can also listen to his insight as a guest on This Week in Media, Episode 51: Something not JPEG. This was a fantastically informative show, a definite Must Listen.