Microsoft Release Beta HD Photo plug-ins for Photoshop

Microsoft have released an updated beta version of their HD Photo plug-in for Photoshop for Windows, they have also introduced a Universal Binary beta for Photoshop for Mac. Microsoft's Bill Crow, Program Manager for HD Photo, has indicated on his blog, that these are likely to be functionally identical to the final versions of the plug-ins for each platform.

HD Photo is a free download for bothWindows and Mac. Microsoft and the JPEG Group recently announced that they have begun the process of standardizing HD Photo as a new variant of JPEG. HD Photo will most likely become known as JPEG XR.

Microsoft Set To Release HDPhoto Plug-in For Photoshop

Microsoft announced that they are releasing plug-ins for Photoshop that add support for the company's new and intriguing image file format, HD Photo. The plug-ins will be available for both Windows and Mac versions of Photoshop CS2 and CS3 and will initially released in beta form, with a final release due sometime in May. The HD Photo plug-ins will be available free of charge. HD Photo support is already included as part of Windows Vista. According to Microsoft:

HD Photo supports a wide range of features including:
Multiple color formats for display or print
Fixed or floating point high-dynamic-range image encoding
Lossless or high-quality lossy compression
Efficient decoding for multiple resolutions and subregions
Minimal overhead for format conversion or transformations during decode

HD Photo delivers a lightweight, high performance algorithm with a small
memory footprint that enables practical, in-device encoding and decoding. It
delivers compression quality comparable with JPEG-2000 and more than twice the
quality of JPEG.

Worth a look at least, but what it will offer beyond other high spec file formats, remains to be seen.