HD Photo

[Drahken]

1) Is there still some options or filters or some such that are available to the format but that haven't been implemented in the plugin yet? All the sites that talk about hdphoto compare it to jp2, but hdphoto images created with xnview are comparable to plain old jpgs. One particualr oddity is that the sites mention smoothing, yet when I create an hdphoto image with xnview, there is no smoothing at all. Indeed, it has even more noticeable blocking artifacts than jpg. I realize you're still working on the plugin and I don't expect it to work perfectly yet, but I'm just trying to figure out whether it's just a crappy format or if the problems are due to flaws in the plugin. (I can't find any other program that can create hdphoto images (nor the older wdp version, before they changed the name), so I have nothing else to compare it with.)

2) Assuming the plugin is accurate and the problems are wih the format itself, hdphoto's only possible usage is for lossless photos. Jp2 gets the best lossless compression on photographic images, but is EXTREMELY slow. Png is much faster, but doesn't compress photographic images as well. Hdphoto falls somewhere in between the 2. It achieves compression sizes about halfway between that of png and that of jp2, and does it much faster than jp2 (time is close to that of png). Near-lossless jpgs (jpgs with a quality setting of 100) achieve both the best compression & the best speed, but do still incur some loss of quality.
For lossy images, hdphoto achieves quality nearly identical to a jpg of the same filesize (and filesize nearly identical to a jpg of the same quality). The only potential advantage I see to hdphoto over jpg is the possibility of alpha transparency.

[xnview]

1) Is there still some options or filters or some such that are available to the format but that haven't been implemented in the plugin yet? All the sites that talk about hdphoto compare it to jp2, but hdphoto images created with xnview are comparable to plain old jpgs. One particualr oddity is that the sites mention smoothing, yet when I create an hdphoto image with xnview, there is no smoothing at all. Indeed, it has even more noticeable blocking artifacts than jpg. I realize you're still working on the plugin and I don't expect it to work perfectly yet, but I'm just trying to figure out whether it's just a crappy format or if the problems are due to flaws in the plugin. (I can't find any other program that can create hdphoto images (nor the older wdp version, before they changed the name), so I have nothing else to compare it with.)

I don't know, i use the toolkit from microsoft (HD Photo Device Porting Kit 1.0), you can test it there is 2 tools to convert hdphoto