Back in August I mentioned that Microsoft’s HD Photo format would very likely become the new JPEG XR standard. Now it’s official! All that remains is the actual work of making the standard a reality:

“The country vote is done, and it passed,” Bill Crow said. “That means the International JPEG committee has decided to go ahead and create the standard. Now it’s just a process of doing that work,” a process that will begin later this month in a meeting in Kobe, Japan.

Support for HD Photo isn’t as broad as it could be, but becoming a standard will likely change that. Still, with support built into every copy of Windows Vista and a firm vote of confidence from Adobe, the future for JPEG XR looks very bright indeed.

Microsoft’s fledgling digital image format, HD Photo, is set to become a new standard file format. The Joint Photographic Expert’s Group (JPEG) announced plans to standardize HD Photo as a new format called JPEG XR (for “extended range”). From Microsoft’s press release:

The ballot deadline for this new project is early October 2007. Finalizing and publishing the completed standard is expected to take up to one year after that. Throughout, Microsoft will be working closely with JPEG to ensure that this new proposed standard serves the needs of the next generation of consumer and professional photographers and delivers the next experience in image display. If approved, Microsoft will offer a royalty-free grant for its patents that are required to implement the standard.

Congratulations to the HD Photo team! Bill Crow explains that his team has been working on HD Photo for a long time:

Our group at Microsoft’s Core Media Processing Team has been working on HD Photo for over five years. The underlying compression technology is based on work from Microsoft Research that goes back even farther than that.

We’re excited to be contributing to the next great standard for digital photography, enabling a whole new level of feature and technology innovation, improving photo quality and creating exciting new applications and services.

Awesome to see things work out so positively. I guess this means we’ll see an explosion of support for HD Photo sooner rather than later!

Microsoft’s Program Manager for HD Photo (aka Windows Media Photo) Bill Crow was on hand yesterday at the Pro Photo Summit in Redmond to show off the photo technology that Microsoft has been working on. In his presentation he used the recently announced Windows Live Photo Gallery to compare HD Photo and JPEG. Don’t worry if you weren’t there, because Bill has a post up today comparing High Dynamic Range Editing with the two formats that I suspect captures the essence of his presentation:

Higher fidelity images can be stored in a high dynamic range, wide gamut format using either fixed or floating point numerical encoding. HD Photo retains image content that would otherwise fall outside the visible range and be clipped using the more typical unsigned integer numerical representation (TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and most other formats.) This may happen when the camera converts from RAW, or during any other editing or conversion operation.

His post contains a bunch of screenshots of Windows Live Photo Gallery as well as links to the two sample photos he used, so check it out!

Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3 users can download a free plug-in to add HD Photo support on Windows Vista and Windows XP. Bill says in his post that a version for OS X (both PPC and Intel) is coming soon.

Very late last night Microsoft announced the managed beta of Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG). It’s an example of the renewed Software+Services focus of Windows Live. According to Brandon LeBlanc at the Windows Experience Blog, WLPG “includes all of the features of Windows Photo Gallery in Windows Vista” while also adding some new functionality and integrating with Windows Live services.

If it really does include all of the features of the previous app, then that means it should support the HD Photo (formerly known as Windows Media Photo) format. If that’s true, then WLPG might be the first widespread bit of software to include support for the fledgling photo format. Version 3 of the .NET Framework includes support for HD Photo, but it will take applications for support to really take off. As WLPG will run on both Windows Vista and Windows XP, it could go a long way to promoting HD Photo as a format.

Too bad the beta is closed - I’d love to try it out! In the meantime, check out the screenshots and other information Brandon posted.