I’ve been a little preoccupied lately and have had trouble getting anything done on Fotohacker, but I couldn’t miss the opportunity to talk about the second coming of Photosynth, the spacial photography browser being developed by some folks over at Microsoft.

Photosynth is a product being worked on by Microsoft Live Labs, and about two years ago they unveiled a tech demo upon the world which got everyone excited. In a nutshell, the application gathers photos from a source and using an advanced set of algorithms it creates paths between these photos allowing you to browse around geographically local environments, almost like a 3D virtual world. It was really cool, but now they’ve gone and outdone themselves. » MORE

Microsoft wants to jump into the online photo and video sharing game, competing with sites like Flickr, Youtube, Rezzer, Smugmug, etc. It’s an obvious move for the Windows Live time, and one that most people saw coming a long time ago, but one that was outlined in a job posting this week. The question however, is whether or not Windows Live and their “DMX” or Digital Memories Experience team can produce something which will tempt users away from their tried and true services.

One thing that could easily seperate DMX from other services is price. Flickr’s $25/year isn’t bad – and I don’t mind paying it for a great service, but DMX could compete on a price level. They could also compete by tightly integrating Photosynth.

The Digital Memories Experience team (DMX) is helping people make deeper connections with those they care about. We want to give you the ability to effortlessly share your memories, be that a simple slideshow of photos and videos (e.g. evolution of the Vista Slideshow or of Photo Story), a carefully authored experienced (evolution of Movie Maker), or a fully interactive cinematic multimedia experience (a narrated 3D path through a Photosynth that you can control). And we want to make it easy and fun to enjoy your photos and videos, whether that is on the PC in your office, the Media Center in your living room, the XBox in your entertainment center, or on your mobile device when you are out and about.

Microsoft has been working on popularizing their new file format for digital photographs recently. The new format is called HD-Photo (previously known as “Windows Media Photo”) and is aimed at replacing the common and long-since standardized JPG graphics format. The format is supported in Windows Vista natively, and with a plugin from Microsoft will be supported in Adobe Photoshop CS2 as well. Microsoft made this announcement last week at the PMA (Photo Marketing Association) Trade Show in Las Vegas, and they seem serious on taking this one all the way.

According to Redmond, the HD-Photo format is the ideal solution for digital image editing as the file sizes are smaller thanks to improved compression, but the resolution is greatly improved over JPG since said compression isn’t nearly as destructive. The format will allow you to decode only the information required at certain resolutions, and will allow you to manipulate the compressed image data. HD-Photo also offers increased image fidelity, preserving the entire original image content and enabling higher-quality exposure and color adjustments in the image, with a greater dynamic range.

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. HD-Photo fully preserves the original image fidelity with high dynamic range while still allowing for significant improvement in compression size. (Amir Majidimehr)

Basically – this means the image is better, smaller, and more flexible to editing than a JPG (which all digital cameras use)… and Microsoft has said that certain camera manufacturers have already stepped up to support the format on their cameras, though we don’t know who yet. This format would not be competing with RAW formats used by manufacturers on their cameras, but could very well take over from the deprecated JPG format.

If you shoot RAW files at all (they’re called NEF on Nikon cameras and CRW on Canon cameras) then you likely have a system for dealing with them. Because RAW files are unstandardized, the RAW format will vary from company to company, and from camera to camera. Nobody has really settled on a “standard” RAW file yet, which upsets a lot of photographers. RAW will continue to remain a non-standard format, so long as the camera company continues to stand behind the format, and there is no good reason to standardize.

But it would be nice to just be able to see those pictures in Windows, and open them in a preview pane without having to open Photoshop or Capture. That’s where the new Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for XP comes in. It’s a fairly small installation, which resembles the Microsoft Picture and Fax Viewer, but is designed for a multitude of RAW files.

You can download the viewer at the Microsoft site.