Saturday, 4 November 2017

Photography is reinvented by Apple’s HEIF Picture format choice

Apple announced plans to adopt the HEIF picture format in WWDC. When it did it pointed in the format’s higher-quality and picture sizes, but I think there are large implications outside this.

A brand new potential for photography

If you’ve read the Harry Potter novels you may recall the picture the youthful wizard’d of his Mum, Dad, along with himself. They looked alive in the picture. It appeared like magic. It seems as an Apple Live Photo.

A picture that’s also a video, Live Photos will be the ideal illustration of the kind of technologies HEIF will enable in Apple hardware and software products.

At present how it functions depends on many technologies and also a succession of images, but with HEIF the picture file can actually be a real video (and sound, and a number of different things).

That is because the structure is different than JPEG — although JPEG is a smart means to digitize a still picture, HEIF (with its own roots in the MPEG-developed HVEC video conventional) is an containerization technology, capable of carrying a lot of various types of information inside a single data file.

The move to use this container technology can make it a lot easier to expand what Live Photos and photography generally can reach. At low picture sizes.

What’s inside?

To concentrate on what I’m attempting to say, I’m skipping many technological details here, but do read this excellent article if you want to learn more about HEIF.

You’ll learn that along with numerous images, an HEIF document can collect picture thumbnails information, image collections and also — and this is essential:

“Image derivation information such as rotation, overlay and grid view together with the images, which means that distinct picture derivations are able to take advantage of the identical image data collection,” along with “auxiliary picture data such as depth map along with alpha channel together with the images.” (Source: Nokia).

Stop for a quick moment and consider the consequences of that: this means that your photo can capture thickness, alpha channel data, planar information…

Basically this means that as well as supplying better grade (16-bit v 8-bit) images at half the file size of JPEG, HEIF can capture the info that you will need to place the topic of your picture in the space.

Now imagine how this kind of information might become helpful within implementations of Apple’s other major WWDC reveal…

Virtual and augmented reality

ARKit will be a work in progress for a little while, but Apple’s move to adopt a more flexible picture format which makes it possible to envision many ways in which it will come to be much easier to bring still images to reality.

As well also seen a couple of other illustrations that reveal how the photography teams of Apple determine the future of images:

  • The iPhone 7 captures 10-bit images — it already makes better images than the present JPEG format can deal with.
  • Portrait Mode is a excellent illustration of how Apple is trying to develop a photographic system which exploits depth of discipline and alpha channel info to produce complex camera effects available in a mobile device.
  • The Reminders program is an excellent example of the way you are able to use complex, brief, moving images to quickly create viral videos.

How do you exploit it?

Utilizing these examples to direct my thinking, I can already imagine a number of the ways Apple and its developers — such as enterprise developers — might be able to use this new picture format to encourage their apps.

  • Consider product design: How effective would this be in terms of quick prototyping and field testing of new products?

Seize the inventive opportunity

I think that it’s time to quit viewing the move to the new picture format as being completely and file size.

That is why developers, enterprises, along with you and I must begin to consider how we can exploit the massive quantity of information held inside these documents. How do we climb with this new prospect? How do we exploit the picture data carried inside them to Enhance photography, and yet generate images that work in their own account?  

Google+   Should you use social networking and have been a Google+ consumer, why don’t you combine  AppleHolic’s Kool Aid Corner neighborhood and join the conversation as we chase the soul of this New Model Apple?

Got an idea?    or from comments below and let me know. I’d like it if you decided to follow me on Twitter so I can let you know when new things are published here on Computerworld.



source http://www.visagesphotography.co.uk/photography-is-reinvented-by-apples-heif-picture-format-choice/

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