----- Original Message ----- From: "Laurenz Bobke" <laurenzb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students" <photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 1:42 PM : Re: HD Photo to become JPEG XR : 2007/11/4, Alexander Georgiadis <georgiadis@xxxxxxxxx>: : > : > I wonder how many existing cameras will get new firmware to allow shooting : > in XR? And how many will become ''obsolete". : : : Wouldn't the transition be a very slow process anyway? I'm not sure how : current web applications could deal with the new format, but in the past it : has taken ages for new web standards to replace outdated ones. MS has it built into Vista, so anyone who's bought into that debacle has it built in, ready to go. Adobe already write largely useless Adobe rubbish to images destined for the web and no one seems to have problems with that.. even though it bloats images horribly. As to displaying the images, this new JPEG XR, whether the image is viewable is browser dependant, and people update, patch and allow third parties to modify their browsers all the time so a new standard can rapidly be deployed these days with little or no impact. For those who might want to see the image outside of the browser - it'd simply be a matter of downloading irfanview or any other image browser that supports the format or downloading the appropriate plugin to make things work. PNG was so rapidly deployed that no one looking at a PNG would have ever known it was an unsupported format not that long back. the DivX codec was a pipedream .. until all of a sudden it was with us and a simple update to our respective choice of media players saw it as integrated as any other format/container. These days it's easy to get new stuff happening as long as the Big Players choose to jump in the sandpit and play - and both MS and Adobe® have joined the party.. : And showing their pictures on the web or sending them by mail or MMS is a : very important application for many photographers. : On the other hand, I'd think that most pros shoot raw anyway and thus it : would mainly be a matter of converting raw or tif files to another : jpg-format? <rant> The what 'most pros do' point is one I always have problems with. Back in the film-only days I used to hear 'most pros shoot chromes' comment, one I found odd given the limited capabilities of chromes to record anything near what a negative film could record. And transferring a chrome to a print resulted in even more loss. The odd polaroid instant slide film however which DID have a huge range was abhorred by slide shooters because it looked 'muddy' as a transparency - in fact it had the broadest dynamic capture of any slide film and Cibachromes from this stuff had far more realism, approaching C41 films with a comparable degree of sharpness to boot. (side note for the cibachrome addicts, Ilfoflex polyester based print film was available for C41 shooters too, with the same rich colour and texture as cibachromes) Another justification was that you had to be good with your exposures with chromes. No guesswork there, if you got it off by half a stop you were dog meat. It was almost a badge of honour - you had to be good to shoot slide.. And here we are in the age of instant previews where a 'spot on' shooter can get the exposure bang on with a jpeg then peak at the back of the camera to confirm this (with even a histogram to check as well!), yet pros now choose to shoot the equivalent of neg films. It all seems very contrary. I find myself going the other way - I shoot neg film almost exclusively, and digitally - jpegs. Since the printers are 8 bit, the monitors we look at are fed by 8 bit video cards (unless you're using a Matrox with a CRT) - from go to whoah *if* my shot was bang on exposure wise an 8 bit jpeg will do the job from start to finish for 90% of my shots. If I want an HDR modification to an image though, ie, to jack the exposure up in low lit areas to raise them to comparable levels of the well lit areas either 2 jpeg shots at appropriate exposures OR a RAW will get me there, in which case, i'd shoot the image in RAW. There is nothing I can see that makes the digital container format whatever it is any more or less professional than what type of film one used - and the *only* thing that made a film 'professional' was consistency between rolls - something anyone could achieve by testing film or buying film in batches. To top it off, I met very, very few photographers pro or otherwise who ever tested a film, either with a densitometer or by shooting test shots of something like a Gretag test chart. So why my choice for jpeg? it writes quicker to the card, I can get more on the card, and in 90% of cases I can get all the image information I need at the time of capture. It's also, one way or another, what we end up with (8 bit) for web viewing or printing. Why would I shoot RAW? I'm iffy about the exposure (rare), I'm drunk and can't think straight enough to get the exposure right (rare), or I want a greater dynamic range to play with than the jpeg (chrome equivalent) can grab - like with some night shots. While I'm ranting and rambling again, I'd also be inclined to ask who shoots automated? Aperture priority, shutter priority or full auto? ..or uses an auto flash / ttl flash or any other method of exposure automation? Do pros do that? do they *really* trust the electronics of the camera to guess the exposure for them? In such cases then a high dynamic range image is probably necessary.. No matter how good the exposure meter in-camera is it is just as readily fooled as any other incident light meter if pointed at a non-average, non 18% reflective subject - especially in the hands of anyone who cannot judge or evaluate exposures accurately. </rant> <breathes> If however we are looking to the people who sell us things to see what they are doing, we find Adobe has had their hand in the pie with MS in supporting this new format.. http://www.news.com/Vista-to-give-HD-Photo-format-more-exposure/2100-1045_3 -6153730.html "Adobe Systems, the most influential image-editing software maker by virtue of its Photoshop products, is helping support HD Photo, said Kevin Connor, Adobe's senior director of product management".. etc http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9767396-39.html "Adobe Systems' Digital Negative (DNG) format isn't a competitor to JPEG XR, a format Microsoft created as a higher-end replacement for conventional JPEG, an Adobe executive has predicted. ".. "According to .. Microsoft's principal program manager for emerging image and video technology, with JPEG XR, "You're giving people much of the capability of raw in a convenient file format. On the ultra-high-end there might be still a preference to use raw." If we're looking for something that might be quicker and faster than RAW but with the extended dynamic range of a RAW, then examining the format will reveal it may just be this new thing Jpeg XR.. it may even be smaller (thus potentially faster again to write) than the jpeg we currently know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Photo HD Photo is an image codec that gives a high-dynamic-range image encoding while requiring only integer operations (with no divides) for both compression and decompression. It supports monochrome, RGB, CMYK and even n-channel color representation, using up to 16-bit unsigned integer representation, or up to 32-bit fixed point or floating point representation, and also supports RGBE Radiance. It may optionally include an embedded ICC color profile, to achieve consistent color representation across multiple devices. An alpha channel may be present for transparency, and Exif and XMP metadata formats are supported. The format allows decoding part of an image, without decoding the entire image. Full decoding is also unnecessary for certain operations such as cropping, downsampling, horizontal or vertical flips, or cardinal rotations. All color representations are transformed to an internal color representation. The transformation is entirely reversible, so, by using appropriate quantizers, both lossy and lossless compression can be achieved. "HD Photo uses a TIFF-like file container " "JPEG supports bit depths of 8 and 12 bits; HD Photo supports bit depths of up to 32 bits. HD Photo also supports lossless compression of floating-point image data; this works by representing the floating-point values in an IEEE 754-like format, and encoding them as though they were integers" "The HD Photo bitstream specification claims that "HD Photo offers image quality comparable to JPEG-2000 with computational and memory performance more closely comparable to JPEG", that it "delivers a lossy compressed image of better perceptive quality than JPEG at less than half the file size", and that "lossless compressed images . are typically 2.5 times smaller than the original uncompressed data"." "Application support There are plugins for Adobe Photoshop and Paint.NET for exporting (saving) to the HD Photo image format. Windows Vista has native HD Photo viewing support via Windows Photo Gallery. Windows Live Photo Gallery can be used to view HD Photo images on Windows XP and Windows Vista. Microsoft Expression Design supports importing and exporting HD Photo images using WIC. Expression Media supports importing HD Photo images. IrfanView 4.10 supports importing HD Photo images via a plugin. Paint.NET 3.10 supports importing and exporting HD Photo images via a plugin. [3] XnView via a plugin" time will tell of course, but as Alexander suggested, it will almost definitely spur a new camera buying frenzy based on the perception of obsolescence with existing cameras should a RAW/Jpeg XR camera hit the stores, just as tiff/jpeg cameras were replaced en mass when RAW/jpeg cameras hit the market :/ Me? I'm unlikely to make a change to a new format unless I see some vastly superior changes to the in-camera processing times to write the thing. As to the size - whether or not the written files are smaller probably won't impact on my choice given the low cost of memory these days. Karl, drowning in cynicism again
