Microsoft HD Photo Plug-ins for Photoshop are Released

Question

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hd_Photo
"HD Photo has been announced by Microsoft and the Joint Photographic Experts Group to be under consideration for a JPEG standard, tentatively titled JPEG XR.
"The HD Photo bitstream specification claims that "HD Photo offers image quality comparable to JPEG-2000 with computational and memory performance more closely comparable to JPEG", that it "delivers a lossy compressed image of better perceptive quality than JPEG at less than half the file size", and that "lossless compressed images are typically 2.5 times smaller than the original uncompressed data".
http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/archive/2007/12/06/hd-photo-plug-ins-for-photoshop-are-rele ased.aspx
"HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 and CS3 have been officially released for both Windows and OSX. They're available now from the Microsoft Download Center. [Links on this webpage]
"The Windows version is supported on Windows XP and Windows Vista, and works with Photoshop CS2 and CS3. While not officially supported, it will also work with limited features with older versions of Photoshop and with Photoshop Elements. The included README file has details.
For PSE6, I installed it to
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 6.0\Plug-Ins\HD Photo Plugin for Adobe Photoshop\
It works properly, as far as I can tell, for both Opening and Saving.
File size and processing speed seem consistent with the claims for the format.

Answer 1

On Sun, 3 Feb 2008 15:38:40 -0800, [email protected] wrote in
<[email protected]>:
>hey that's neat but what can you do with them ? I noticed double
>clicking on a file saved in this format from ' My pictures '
>automatically opens the windows print wizard. Also noticed it seems to
>slightly soften images and removes tiny artifacts which is nice.
>Photoshop seems to be the only program that will open the file though
>so can't do slideshows from Pro Show Gold.....which doesn't matter much
>for me since I don't have a high def player for my HDTV anyways;) Just
>wondering if I missed something in there somewhere as far as taking
>advantage of a high def image in this format. Would be nice to create a
>high def slideshow for the TV.
Regular JPEG is capable of high definition (size) images.
The "HD" in "HD Photo" is a reference to the fact that the bit depth can
greatly exceed the 8-bit limitation of regular JPEG. That's primarily
of value in high-quality photo editing, and for archiving originals.
>On another note...are those high-def wanna-be upconversion players any
>good ? Anybody have one ? I'm convinced they can't be any better than a
>regular good DVD player. My crystal ball says within the next 3 years
>all players will have a built in HD capability....though the war is
>still out on whether it's going to be blu-ray or hd. Want it now.
DVD player upconversion is no better than the upconversion built-in to
any decent HD TV; i.e., it's mostly just marketing hype.
Best regards, Be sure to check for answers to your questions at
John Navas http://help.adobe.com/en_US/PhotoshopElements/6.0/