This has to be good news for photographers and lovers of digital imagery everywhere. Today Microsoft formally announced the new Windows Media file format (also known as HD Photo) and released plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop as well as a device porting kit to allow manufacturers to add HD Photo support to their devices and services. The compression in the HD Photo format is up to twice as efficient as JPEG with fewer damaging artefacts. So now we can get better images that require as little as half the storage space. If you take lots of digital photos that’s a very big deal!
I’ll be testing out the beta versions of the plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop and will let you know what I think. You can download these from here and find out more about this exciting new photo file format here.
(This blog entries is dedicated to Augustin without whom my blog would have lain dormant for longer)