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View Full Version : HD Photo (JPEG XR): I Think It's Worthwhile After All


Jason Dunn
08-24-2007, 11:00 AM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/archive/2007/07/12/high-dynamic-range-editing.aspx' target='_blank'>http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/archive/2007/07/12/high-dynamic-range-editing.aspx</a><br /><br /></div><i>"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><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/HDphoto-vs-JPEG.jpg" /><br /><br />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 <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/archive/2007/07/31/industry-standardization-for-hd-photo.aspx">some of the advantages to HD Photo</a>, 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. <!><br /><br />What really caught my attention, however, was <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/archive/2007/07/12/high-dynamic-range-editing.aspx">this demonstration of an actual photo fixing job</a> 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!).<!><br /><br />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. <br /><br />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).

ptyork
08-24-2007, 06:33 PM
Okay, so I try to fool myself into thinking that I'm a prosumer digital photographer, but in reality I'm closer to amateur. I've got my Rebel and I take tons of shots and touch them up in Picasa. However, I've really gotten to a point of being pretty darned disappointed with my results and this topic really caught my attention.

So I need some help. First, I played around with capturing some images in RAW format a while ago, but I gave it up because it chewed through my battery and memory card faster and I didn't see any differences in the final result. However, I think the latter reason was probably major user error on my part.

I know that Picasa can "handle" RAW images, but does it take advantage of any of the additional data? If not, what is the most economical option to do so? Do I really need to get the full version of Photoshop to get this kind of control?

Brightening up underexposed images seems to be the bane of my retouching existence. I constantly end up overexposure on a large portion of my picture in order to get the focal point (usually a face) looking right. Will using RAW help with this? I guess this would be a two part question. First does RAW support the same "high dynamic range wide gamut" data that HD Photo does, and Second would the procedure shown in the article work both ways (fixing underexposure as well as overexposure)?

I guess my last question would just be a pointer to a site/book that would give a dummy that doesn't want to be a dummy some instruction on how best to attack digital retouching so that I get the prosumer results that I like to pretend I can.

Thanks!

billcrow
08-24-2007, 10:51 PM
Overall, Jason presents a good analysis of the current situation. We are on the leading edge of the deployment of a new technology that will require many changes to the overall digital photo ecosystem.

To be able to take full advantage of HD Photo, it should ideally be the format produced by the camera, and this has been one of Microsoft's primary goals from the beginning. We've offered a free Device Porting Kit for hardware manufacturers for over two years; long before we actually shipped the format in Windows. Now that the JPEG committee is fully engaged to evaluate HD Photo as a new member of the JPEG family (to be called JPEG XR), we're moving that much closer to adoption by camera manufacturers. (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/jul07/07-31JPEGXRPR.mspx)

This is a big chicken-and-egg problem, and it will take some time for support for HD Photo to become pervasive enough to enable many of the scenarios we ultimately would like to see.

Given where we are right now, today, if taking advantage of the benefits of HD Photo requires shooting in RAW and converting to HD Photo as part of a high dynamic range wide gamut workflow, then it probably makes more sense to use tools like Lightroom or Aperture and use the RAW files as the source for image editing.

HD Photo isn't for photographers who have learned the intricacies and associated workflows of shooting in RAW. HD Photo will help enable significantly improved photo quality for the vast number of customers who have no interest to invest in learning and understanding the details and complexity of a RAW based workflow. In the future, many photographers who are forced to use a RAW workflow today could accomplish equivalent results using a much simpler process with less technical complexity. But for the photographer that loves to be immersed in all the details of the image creation process, a RAW workflow will probably always be the solution of choice.

That said, there are still some short term potential scenarios where HD Photo could offer some significant value:

- Camera acquisition software could automatically convert from RAW to HD Photo at the time the image is acquired. Unlike conversion to TIFF or JPEG, conversion to HD Photo using an HDR/WG pixel format doesn't discard any dynamic range or gamut, so it's safe to allow this to be an automatic process with no intervention by the photographer. Then, subsequent editing and image manipulation can be done using HD Photo files (albeit once there are more applications that fully support the format.) This gets us pretty close to having the HD Photo files produced in the camera, but could be implemented with cameras available today.

- HD Photo offers a great alternative to TIFF (or JPEG) for saving images that have been manually processed from RAW files. The combination of support for many different pixel formats, including HDR/WG, plus lossless (or high quality lossy) compression makes it an ideal format for intermediate storage of processed RGB images as well as image archiving.

The progressive decoding capability provided by HD Photo, combined with great compression is already enabling new applications and capabilities that were not practical with previous formats. Microsoft's Photosynth Technology Preview (http://labs.live.com/photosynth) , the HD View giga-pixel image viewer from Microsoft Research (http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDView.htm) and the 3D imaging capabilities in Microsoft Virtual Earth (http://maps.live.com) all take advantage of the capabilities enabled by HD Photo.

While there are no cameras that natively support HD Photo today, there are reasons to believe this type of support could come quickly. The current standardization process underway at JPEG is moving very quickly, with the vote scheduled for later this year. In addition, multiple companies that manufacturers the chipsets that are used inside digital cameras have already announced that HD Photo support is currently available. HD Photo is a component of XPS (XML Paper Specification), the new printer spool file format in Windows, so many printer companies have already implemented support. There's a lot of work well underway to support HD Photo in devices.

In addition to HD Photo's support for high dynamic range wide gamut imaging and for progressive downloading capability, the improvements in compression efficiency are also very important. While cheap hard drives and memory cards have made local storage less of an issue, the growing use of online photo storage and sharing, plus wireless camera connectivity will see major benefits in cost, image quality and performance thanks to better compression. Smaller files also mean faster recycle time and longer battery life in cameras.

Microsoft is in this for the long haul. Standardization through JPEG is a very important component for accelerating adoption and there's a lot that's already happening towards the goal of native support in cameras. It's not going to happen overnight, but I believe we're well on the way to achieving the objectives we envisioned when we first started this program.

Bill Crow
HD Photo Program Manager
http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow