We all know and love the JPEG format for digital photos but Microsoft has finally launched its long talked-about HD Photo format, promising many improvements.

Formerly known as Windows Media Photo, HD Photo offers a lot of advantages over JPEG, including higher image quality, greater preservation of data and advanced features. HD Photo offers compression with up to twice the efficiency of JPEG, with less damaging artifacts, leaving you with files that 50 per cent smaller. This is good news for the many digital camera owners that never get around to transferring their favourite snaps off their storage cards.

“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.”

The company has announced set of HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop software, that will run under Windows Vista and XP, as well as Mac OS X. You can download a beta version of the plug-ins here. Final versions of the plug-ins will be available for free in May. 

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