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Microsoft Move to be the End of JPEG?
jcatcw writes "Microsoft Corp. will submit a new photo format to an international standards organization. The format, HD Photo (formerly known as Windows Media Photo), can accommodate lossless and lossy compression. Microsoft claims that adjustments can be made to color balance and exposure settings that won't discard or truncate data that occurs with other bit-map formats."
If you're not discarding data when you're adjusting color-balance and other settings, you're by definition not compressing as much as you possibly can.
For example, if I desaturate a photo I'm throwing away tons of color information. If that color information is still being written to the file, the file isn't as small as it could be.
Aside from that, PNG should have dethroned JPG long ago for the very simple reason that it contains an alpha channel -- but I still see plenty of JPG's.
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Doesn't do anything tiff can't
If this is the same as the last time around, they've just taken tiff, duplicated a bunch of the baseline tags for no good reason (other than to make it incompatible), added their own codec (which they could have done to tiff very easily), removed a bunch of useful stuff from tiff, and called it their own image format. It's a real hack job.
It's just MS being the MS we've come to know and love so well -- making their own binary formats in the hopes of extending their monopoly.
Ian Ameline
I don't see how this would replace jpg in any remote way whatsoever. Where are most images stored and viewed? On the internet and a browser. I need a small, high quality image. I don't need to go visit cnn.com and adjust the tint, hue and color levels of the "breaking news" graphic on their site.
Not to mention, I am highly skeptical of any attempt Microsoft claims to be making toward "standardization".
"Doesn't matter, the point is that anyone who's dissatisifed with JPG has allready found an alternative."
That's not what you said. You said "Not going to end jpg - everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW." RAW is a camera format, not an output format. No one uses RAW as a replacement for jpeg except during image acquisition.
As for everyone already using alternatives, that may be so but that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. This may not be the answer but it's naive to think that the image formats we have now are all there will ever be.
Is space more valuable than time? CPUs are becoming faster, but storage is becoming cheaper too...
Don't forget that it's no longer just space/time tradeoffs. There's also the network bandwidth tradeoff. And network bandwidth is not on the same kind of curve as CPU's or storage at least for WANs.
Well.... the whole point of RAW isn't to share files. It's to preserve sensor data EXACTLY as it is received so that it can be processed on a computer, and not on the camera itself. This has numerous advantages, as it is possible to make substantial adjustments to the image without severely compromising image quality.
Because there are various algorithms to do this, it would be downright foolish to send a RAW file to an agency. However, because there's no loss, converting the RAW to a TIFF is trivial, and there's no real reason not to shoot raw unless you don't plan on doing any post-processing. Also, RAW files tend to be smaller than TIFFs when shot on the camera.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose