Friday, August 24, 2007
HD Photo (JPEG XR): I Think It's Worthwhile After All
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 03:00 AM
"Most imaging applications aren't designed to understand high dynamic range, wide gamut pixel formats. There are some specialized tools, used primarily by the visual effects world, that work with high dynamic range formats. Adobe Photoshop CS3 (and CS2) supports high dynamic range wide gamut editing using the 32-bit editing mode. You probably never realized that Windows Vista Photo Gallery - the simple, easy-to-use photo tools built into Windows Vista - also supports high dynamic range wide gamut editing. That's right, Photo Gallery. Let's walk through an example, using the Beta of the new Windows Live Photo Gallery."
I've made no secrets about what I thought a waste of time HD Photo (formerly known as Windows Media Photo) was. All of the initial information about the subject pointed to better compression being the best feature - "It's like JPEG, only smalelr!". Consumers are not worrying about running out of hard drive or memory card space, so this seemed like a dubious benefit at best. This morning, however, after I did some reading about some of the advantages to HD Photo, it started to make much more sense to me. It's a bit like RAW in terms of being able to capture much more information than JPEG can.
What really caught my attention, however, was this demonstration of an actual photo fixing job and how much better the HD Photo result is. That's some impressive stuff, on par with what RAW can get you (a heck of a lot easier though!).
Here's what I don't understand, and perhaps one of you readers can educate me on: until there are cameras out that can capture in HD Photo, where exactly are the source files going to come from? I have a sneaking suspicion that the example above was created by taking a RAW file and converting it to both an over-exposed JPEG and an over-exposed HD Photo just so we could see what HD Photo is capable of. That's fine for example purposes, but until my digital camera can capture in HD Photo, I'll have to keep shooting RAW to get the quality I want.
Or is the point here to create a format, get it standardized, then lobby the camera manufacturers to include support for this new format? If that's the plan, and I think it is, this is a very long timeline before we'll be able to use this format (as in, years).
I've made no secrets about what I thought a waste of time HD Photo (formerly known as Windows Media Photo) was. All of the initial information about the subject pointed to better compression being the best feature - "It's like JPEG, only smalelr!". Consumers are not worrying about running out of hard drive or memory card space, so this seemed like a dubious benefit at best. This morning, however, after I did some reading about some of the advantages to HD Photo, it started to make much more sense to me. It's a bit like RAW in terms of being able to capture much more information than JPEG can.
What really caught my attention, however, was this demonstration of an actual photo fixing job and how much better the HD Photo result is. That's some impressive stuff, on par with what RAW can get you (a heck of a lot easier though!).
Here's what I don't understand, and perhaps one of you readers can educate me on: until there are cameras out that can capture in HD Photo, where exactly are the source files going to come from? I have a sneaking suspicion that the example above was created by taking a RAW file and converting it to both an over-exposed JPEG and an over-exposed HD Photo just so we could see what HD Photo is capable of. That's fine for example purposes, but until my digital camera can capture in HD Photo, I'll have to keep shooting RAW to get the quality I want.
Or is the point here to create a format, get it standardized, then lobby the camera manufacturers to include support for this new format? If that's the plan, and I think it is, this is a very long timeline before we'll be able to use this format (as in, years).
