Microsoft will make a move designed to kill the JPEG photo format. The Joint Photographic Experts Group standard is at this time the ubiquitous file format for digital photographies. With the introduction of HD Photo, Microsoft aims to deliver a superior alternative to JPEG. In this context, the Redmond Company has revealed that it will submit the HD Photo format to an appropriate standards organization in order to make it an industry standard and not a technology that is intimately connected to Microsoft.

HD Photo has been applauded for delivering a superior photographic experience in comparison with the JPEG format. Higher quality, fewer artifacts, increased fidelity, advanced resolution decoding and image data manipulation together with lossless and lossy image compression capabilities are the arguments that place HD Photo over JPEG.

"With HD Photo, we're taking a new approach to creating and editing photos that simply isn't available to photographers with today's formats," said Amir Majidimehr, corporate vice president of the Consumer Media Technology Group at Microsoft. "HD Photo fully preserves the original image fidelity with high dynamic range while still allowing for significant improvement in compression size."

Microsoft also made available a beta release of a set of HD Photo plug-ins (at the time of this article the plug-ins were not yet available for download) designed to integrate seamlessly with Adobe Photoshop software. Via the HD Photo plug-ins, Photoshop users will be able to view and write files in the new Microsoft photo format from Adobe applications. Microsoft informed that it will deliver support for both Photoshop CS2 and CS3. The Redmond Company announced that the final version of the plug-ins will be delivered as a free download within 60 days.

"These plug-ins enable users to both read and write HD Photo files from within Adobe Photoshop software, and include support for high dynamic range pixel formats (...) and will be available for Windows Vista and Windows XP, as well as Mac OS X (Universal Binary)," Microsoft added in a press release.