Microsofts new HD Photo codec.

Has anyone here tested the new HD Photo codec. I've been doing some tests with it at home so i wrote a simple and basic command line encoder and i must say i'm pretty impressed with the image quality. The main difference i notice between HD Photo and JPG is that artifacts in HD Photo are more like overall picture noise instead of halos around edges and bad gradients like JPG.

I haven't done very scientific tests though but i'm liking what i see so far. Lossless encoding is pretty much on par with PNG (at least with standard 32bit/24bit (A)RGB files).

If you don't have Photoshop and the HD Photo beta plugin feel free to check out my command line encoder, since i posted the source code in the Sandbox. The code was written pretty quickly though so it could propably be prettyer and the error handling and input checking could be a lot better

Also, I don't have any real life, high def files to test though, so if someone could hook me up with some high res PNG's from a high-end camera that'd be awesome.

Edit: The source didn't get uploaded to the sandbox for some reason so i edited the post over there with a link to the file. You can also grab it here.

Do you have the DNG plugins for Photoshop? I have some 3504 x 2336 @ 8.2 Mpixel images with some interesting textures that I could send you. Not the best of cameras, but the 30D doesn't suck.

Unfortunately i don't have Photoshop (that's why i made the command line encoder) . Is there a chance you could convert it to a PNG and put up somewhere (or gmail to me)?

Interesting, a 7MB DNG file becomes a 37MB PNG and a 12MB TIFF file. Unfortunately there is no export to PNG in Lightroom, or I'd say go download the free trial.

I've made a crop and sent it to your hotmail address.

kettch wrote:



Interesting, a 7MB DNG file becomes a 37MB PNG and a 12MB TIFF file. Unfortunately there is no export to PNG in Lightroom, or I'd say go download the free trial.

I've made a crop and sent it to your hotmail address.

Hmm.. interesting that the PNG is so much bigger than the TIFF. Is it possible the PNG was storing more than 8 bits per color channel?Anyways, thanks a bunch for sending me the PNG. Nice to have something different to test the codec with.

Edit: Yup, that explains it The PNG you sent me has a bit-depth of 48 so it's storing 16 bits per color . It'll be interesting to see how the codec handles it.

Edit 2: Interesting. Converting the PNG to a lossless HD Photo, reatining the same 48bit bit-depth delivered a 3.46 megabyte file while the PNG was 4.43 megabytes. That's quite an improvement given that there was no loss in detail. I then proceded to create another HD Photo file (same bit-depth) with quality settings at default (0.9) and that resulted in a file with a filesize of 2.12 megabytes with no visible loss in detail (at least not to my eyes). I'm reeeeallly starting to like this codec.

HD Photo is nice, its basically all the improvements of JPEG 2000, except that it performs well enough to implement in a digital camera.

I'm glad it worked. Interesting about the bit depth. Photoshop doesn't give any options for export of PNG except for interlaced and non interlaced, and lightroom doesn't export PNG at all. It must just be a default.

There's mention of Adobe supporting HDPhoto, does anybody know if there is actually a plugin for Photoshop yet? I tried looking on Adobe's site, but they've got nothing.

There seems to be the usual round of Microsoft bashing going on surrounding HDPhoto. There are a lot of comparisons with JPEG2000. Has anybody seen any good comparisons that don't include the usual "OMG teh Micro$oft" crap?

EDIT: PNG supports truecolor RGB and RGBA for a max bit-depth of 48 and 64 respectively.

So HD Photo have far more efficent lossless and loss compression?

Cool stuff.

Anyway, its good that Microsoft is submitting this through standards process and releasing a development toolkit. This means all other platforms like Unix/*nix can build their own codec implementation if or when HD Photo begins offsetting JPEG.

kettch wrote:



I'm glad it worked. Interesting about the bit depth. Photoshop doesn't give any options for export of PNG except for interlaced and non interlaced, and lightroom doesn't export PNG at all. It must just be a default.

I think you have to set the bit-depth of the image to 8bits per channel before trying to save. I can't remember where it is in Photoshop but i'm pretty sure you have to do that first and then save and then Photoshop automatically sets the bit-depth of the output format.
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kettch wrote:


There's mention of Adobe supporting HDPhoto, does anybody know if there is actually a plugin for Photoshop yet? I tried looking on Adobe's site, but they've got nothing.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/downloads/hdphoto.mspx

kettch wrote:

There seems to be the usual round of Microsoft bashing going on surrounding HDPhoto. There are a lot of comparisons with JPEG2000. Has anybody seen any good comparisons that don't include the usual "OMG teh Micro$oft" crap?

EDIT: PNG supports truecolor RGB and RGBA for a max bit-depth of 48 and 64 respectively.

Even if HD Photo can't reach JPEG2000's quality (which i think it can in most if not all cases, it's usually a question of codec parameters) HD Photo still has the advantage that it is built to be easy to implement in hardware so instead of camera vendors all having their own RAW format they can save directly to lossless HD Photo making life easier for photographers. Of course i'm presuming camera vendors will actually implement the codec in their cameras which i'm sure MS is actively encouraging them to do.

HD Photo also has all sorts of benefits like full metadata support and built in ICC profiles (i don't know if JPEG2000 supports those, i'm not to knowledgeable about that codec).

Xaero_Vincent wrote:

So HD Photo have far more efficent lossless and loss compression?

Cool stuff.

Anyway, its good that Microsoft is submitting this through standards process and releasing a development toolkit. This means all other platforms like Unix/*nix can build their own codec implementation if or when HD Photo begins offsetting JPEG.

Well i find it to be a lot better than JPG and PNG at least for high res content. Compared to JPEG2000 i'm not sure quality/efficiency wise and i'm not sure either if JPEG2000 supports all the neat stuff HD Photo has like built in ICC profiles and extensive metadata and bit-depth support. There is a lot of stuff in the advanced codec options that is quite interesting. Look up the System.Windows.Media.Imaging namespace on MSDN to have a look at the programmer docs if you want.

Stebet wrote:


I think you have to set the bit-depth of the image to 8bits per channel before trying to save. I can't remember where it is in Photoshop but i'm pretty sure you have to do that first and then save and then Photoshop automatically sets the bit-depth of the output format.

Yeah, I just found that. Thanks.

Stebet wrote:



Even if HD Photo can't reach JPEG2000's quality (which i think it can in most if not all cases, it's usually a question of codec parameters) HD Photo still has the advantage that it is built to be easy to implement in hardware so instead of camera vendors all having their own RAW format they can save directly to lossless HD Photo making life easier for photographers. Of course i'm presuming camera vendors will actually implement the codec in their cameras which i'm sure MS is actively encouraging them to do.

A unified RAW format is something that all photographers would like to see. However Adobe is already ahead of the pack with DNG. DNG looks like it could work, but there are enough issues being raised by opponents that I'm hesitant to convert my own workflow over.

Stebet wrote:



HD Photo also has all sorts of benefits like full metadata support and built in ICC profiles (i don't know if JPEG2000 supports those, i'm not to knowledgeable about that codec).

Metadata is another area of disagreement. Sure, there are the standard fields, but the current state of organization of metadata in things like RAW and DNG make it uncertain how that will port forward in the future. I'd like to see more info on the metadata storage for HD Photo. It would be nice to have it in a more discoverable format.

I just sent an email to Bill Crow (the program manager for HD Photo) and asked him if he or someone from his team could take a look at this thread and answer some of the questions we have. I hope we'll  see someone from the team answer some of our questions if they aren't too busy

I'm impressed by this new format and I'd love to see a video about it.

I opened a huge .TIF file that was taken with Canon EOS-1Ds MkII and saved it as a quality 80 .jpg with Photoshop then as a quality 80 .wdp file and I was surprised at the quality I got.
The jpeg was 1.28 MB and the .wdp 1.26 MB so the file size difference isn't huge but the obvious lack of compression artifacts was amazing. I zoomed in by 300% and it's indistinguishable from the original lossless file but the jpeg has those annoying compression artifacts I've always hated all over the place.

A video would be nice.

I wonder if there'll ever be firmware updates for cameras? I have a Canon EOS D400... would be nice to have support for HDP.

And are we supposed to call them .wdp or .hdp? Because .wdp will never ever catch on. People will shun it just for the name.

Hi all,

I'm the Program Manager for HD Photo.  I'll do my best to keep tabs on this thread and answer questions.  I'm also working on posting more frequent updates on my MSDN blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow. 

The preferred file extension for HD Photo is .wdp.  The spec also indicates that .hdp is acceptable.  However, currently Vista will only recognize .wdp by default as HD Photo files.

In fact, Vista calls these files "Windows Media Photo".  That was the original name for the format, but we changed it based on feedback from multiple partners.  HD Photo (the space in the middle is important) is a generic term, not a Microsoft trademark.  Unfortunately, this change was made late enough in the Windows Vista development cycle that we weren't able to change the name.

HD Photo is a pretty sophisticated format, with support for many pixel formats, a whole host of encoder options and some powerful decoding features.  Different configurations and settings will work better for specific applications.  Our goal was to deliver a file format that was flexible enough to address the entire spectrum of digital photography scenarios, yet still be high performance and lightweight for device implementations.

I'll do my best to talk about all the different features on my blog in the coming weeks.

Sweet, thanks Bill. I'm looking forward to hearing more. I've also got a lot of catch up reading to do, now that I know about your blog.

Nice... thanks Bill!

It's a shame they didn't get support for this image format in IE7, it would have given it a big boost.