Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest maker of software, has announced its own format to store high definition photos. The new format is claimed to feature compression efficiency higher than that of JPEG and abilities to preserve certain details that are necessary to edit photos properly, something available in formats such as RAW. Nevertheless, none of camera manufacturers have announced support for HD Photo format.

“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.”

According to the company’s HD Photo offers compression with up to twice the efficiency of JPEG, with fewer damaging artifacts, resulting in higher-quality images that are one-half the file size. In addition, HD Photo offers increased image fidelity, preserving the entire original image content and enabling higher-quality exposure and color adjustments in the image. This new format is claimed to offer the ability to decode only the information needed for any resolution or region, or the option to manipulate the image as compressed data.

In addition, HD Photo offers both lossless and lossy image compression, and can retain the full dynamic range and color gamut data from a camera’s sensor. Also, because making adjustments to common color balance and exposure settings will not discard or truncate data as other common bitmap formats typically do, it is easier to “undo” those changes at a later time. As a result, significantly smaller files can be created while still retaining optimum picture quality.

HD Photo is natively supported in Windows Vista by a Windows Imaging Component (WIC) codec, and can be similarly supported in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 through a free WIC download. HD Photo is also included in Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0.

Microsoft said the beta release of a set of HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop software, developed with the help of Adobe Systems. 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. The plug-ins support both the CS3 and CS2 versions of Adobe Photoshop software, and will be available for Windows Vista and Windows XP, as well as Mac OS X (Universal Binary).

The HD Photo Device Porting Kit is also available for download at the Microsoft download center, allowing manufacturers to add HD Photo support in devices and to other platforms.