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.