HD Photo Plug-ins for Photoshop are Released

HD Photo Plug-ins for Photoshop are Released

HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 and CS3 have been officially released for both Windows and OSX. They're available now from the Microsoft Download Center.

Here are the separate downloads for Windows and OSX.

The Windows version is supported on Windows XP and Windows Vista, and works with Photoshop CS2 and CS3. While not officially supported, it will also work with limited features with older versions of Photoshop and with Photoshop Elements. The included README file has details.

The OSX version works with both 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard), and supports Photoshop CS2 and CS3.

The features supported on Windows and OSX are identical. The files created with either version are fully compatible with each other and with Windows Vista, Windows Live Photo Gallery, the HD Photo Device Porting Kit, and several other applications that support HD Photo.

I previously posted information about the features provided in the plug-in and an overview of the encoder parameters and what they do. Take a look at previous blog entries here and here. I also gave a presentation at WinHEC 2007 about HD Photo Best Practices. While targeted primarily for hardware developers, the presentation contains a lot of information that may be useful for Photoshop users that want to best optimize their encoder parameters. You can find a copy of the presentation here: WinHEC 2007: HD Photo Implementation Guidelines.

If you've been using the beta version released last summer, you won't find anything new here (other than the removal of the expiration date and the absence of BETA in the name.) All the changes we've made since the last beta are under the covers, fixing a couple minor bugs, addressing several theoretical security vulnerabilities and generally bringing the code up to current Microsoft standards for released software. But on the surface, the released plug-ins look and act identical to the most recent betas. Don't forget that the BETA versions will expire on December 31st, so you should definitely download and install these new released versions.

Once again, I'd like to acknowledge and thank Pegasus Imaging Systems for their participation in the development of these plug-ins.