Beach Wedding planning

This was another wedding planned by Amy of Fabulous Wedding Planning. Amy is a fabulous wedding planner. This was a small intimate beach wedding as is great for a couple from out of town that need help with planning.

All of these pictures taken by Robert H. Walker

Microsoft is banking on a new imaging format called JPEG XR

By Robert Walker
Photography of Palm Beach

We at Photography of Palm Beach use the large JPEG standard for all of our wedding customers. We use large JPEG and it has a 4 to 1 compression ratio. This large format has very little loss of information quality in the way of photographic formatting. Raw format is great for editing and formatting, but the customers need JPEG for their printing of their images at the photo labs.

Cannon and Nikon use different methods for their "raw" format in the way they process their pictures or digital images and they are not compatible. There is no industry standard at the present time. Tiff and JPEG is the closest thing to an industry standard at the moment.

We do hope that maybe one day we will see a new and better standard for digital image compression that has little or no loss of information in the compression of the digital file.

Bill Gates and the Microsoft group are looking to have the entire photographic industry switch as an alternative to the photography standard known as the JPEG image format. Microsoft is hoping that this could become an industry standard. If adopted by the photography and camera manufacturers then this could be a major step in Microsoft’s business ambitions to spread this photographic technology and this would boost the newest Vista operating system.

(I have personally had problems with Vista and it made me switch to Apple)

The Joint Photographic Experts Group has named the current industry standard, which is what the JPEG file format is named after. They want to see if they should make Microsoft's relatively new HD Photo format a new standard.

“Getting to this stage is a good sign in Microsoft's view, and the company has hopes the format will be accepted as a standard called JPEG XR” as quoted by Mr. Robert Rossi, who is the principal program manager at Microsoft for emerging image and video technology.

"The fact that this happened is a very strong endorsement. It's very rare for this to be reversed in the formalities that happen between now and October," Rossi is quoted as saying. Microsoft wants the new format to be the standard.

“JPEG standardization could improve the format's prospects” Info Trends analyst Ed Lee is quoted as saying. "That helps the potential future of the standard significantly," he is also quoted as saying. “With an open standard, it will be easier to win allies such as camera makers, and competitors "won't feel as wary about adopting it."

The new standard will need the support of Adobe and Photoshop otherwise the new standard would be doomed to failure. Adobe’s Photoshop is the industry standard for digital image editing and retouching of photographs. Microsoft hopes the new HD format will put their new product lines in the middle of people's digital imaging. Windows Vista has built-in support for the file format right out of the box.

"It's going to make Vista more attractive as an operating system to use," Rossi is quoted as saying. Microsoft has found some very important partners for JPEG XR. Hasselblad is reported to be on-board with using the new entry into the imaging format by Microsoft. Earlier this year, Microsoft already won praise from image-editing software Adobe, which is the digital image and graphic design standard in the USA and much of the world.

Standardization alone will not guarantee success with consumers or businesses. It was reported that JPEG 2000, a successor to the original JPEG that came from the same photographic experts industry standards group, has been a complete failure the consumer markets and this even though it offered much more superior compression quality.

The new XR file format began its debut in the Windows Media Photo. 2006 sparked an effort by Microsoft to encourage a much broader acceptance as Microsoft changed the name of the imaging format to HD Photo. Microsoft also rescinded restrictive licensing and went to the open source and royalty-free terms of usage by the public.

The "XR" in the name has reference to and stands for the extended range of color tones that the format can represent as opposed to the standard JPEG of today. Microsoft claims that this new technology of XR JPEG can represent each separate component of red, blue and green color in a pixel with 8 bits of data. Digital cameras usually take and record images with 12 bits of data so this has a conversion factor to JPEG typically loses some information in a digital image that a photographer might desire to keep. Digital imaging details in the shadows of a face or the creases in light colored clothing. JPEG XR can store a minimum of 16 of data per color for each pixel.

Newer color printers should be able to tap into the full capabilities of the new technology Microsoft hopes. Among some of the many other advantages Microsoft puts forth are: Compression technology that can record the same quality as traditional JPEG but using only half the file size space or twice the quality at the same file size as using the standard JPEG available now. Also Microsoft states that in addition, unlike JPEG, the XR format’s new encoding algorithm will preserve all the digital imaging pixel data in what is called "loss less" compression and this is comparable to raw imaging.

XR is said to permit richer more vivid colors and better archival preservation as images are moved from camera to computer to printer. If this is as good as Microsoft states then this should be a real boom for the professional photographer and digital graphic artist.

HD Photo images can be huge, as large as 68.6 terapixels total, as long as the compressed image doesn't exceed 32GB in size.

Many photographers of today are seeking to use and extract all the digital imaging data from their cameras using the so-called "raw" formats, which capture image sensor information without in-camera processing.

The “raw” format allows one to have more manipulation of the following: color balance, sharpening, noise reduction and lossy compression into JPEG. Raw images are converted to the manufacturers proprietary file formats that are more easily viewed or printed formats such as JPEG or TIFF. TIFF is a large format imaging formula that is very good at preserving data and has very little loss in data.

Microsoft is banking that JPEG XR will do away with need for raw imaging.
"You're giving people much of the capability of raw in a convenient file format," Rossi said. "On the ultra-high-end there might be still a preference to use raw," he added. Getting the average mainstream photographer to use the new XR JPEG format will be a challenge. Standardization by the industry experts and computer and camera makers could make that easier.
"The bigger challenge is going to be getting the equipment manufacturers to buy in and incorporate that compression standard into their hardware," Lee said. "Once you've got that hardware, you're well on your way to getting it at least adopted by some consumers."

We will see where this goes and Microsoft has a habit of making something free and then start charging for what was once free, once it has been accepted into the mainstream.