JPEG2000 Plug-In for Photoshop CS

I remember a while back there was a thread in which someone asked if there were a way to preview images as JPEG2000's before uploading them to SL. Well, today I was playing around with my Adobe Creative Suite CD's and I discovered something I hadn't previously noticed. Photoshop CS actually comes with a JPEG2000 plugin. This might be old news to some, but for me it was a suprise.

If anyone else is interested, here's how to install it for Windows. Perhaps Robin or someone could post the Mac instructions. I haven't touched a Mac in a couple years. Also, I assume it's the same for CS2, but I'm not sure since I haven't upgraded yet.

If you have the whole creative suite, the plug-in on the disk called "Resources & Extras 1". Make sure Photoshop is not running, and then navigate on the CD to Goodies\Photoshop CS\Optional Plug-Ins\Photoshop Only\File Formats and you'll see a file called JPEG2000.8BI. Copy that to your Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS\Plug-Ins\Adobe Photoshop Only\File Formats on your hard drive.

If you bought Photoshop without the rest of the suite, I think everything's all on one CD. Look for a folder called Optional Plug-Ins and go from there. The rest of the instructions should be the same.

That's all there is to it. The next time you start Photoshop, you'll be able to save files as JPEG2000. It might prompt you the first time that you have to re-activate Photoshop since your configuration has changed, but that's no big deal. Just click OK and let it do its thing. it only takes a second.

Now you'll be able to play around with JPEG2000 settings and see what SL might do to your images. Of course, we don't know what settings SL uses, but I'm going to ask the Lindens and see what they have to say about it. Until I get a definitive answer, visual evidence suggests that they're using a pretty high quality setting, but not the highest, so selecting something around 75% is a safe way to go to undershoot where the mark probably is. Understand, that's purely a guess on my part. SL's quality setting could be higher or lower (probably higher) and it very likely could vary from image to image, according whatever logic that LL may have seen fit to impose.

Also, it probably goes without saying, but keep in mind that no amount of experimentation with this plugin will acurately show exactly what your image will look like when applied to a prim in SL since there's no way it can account for SL's ever-changing lighting conditions. So, if you're interested in things like color match, this won't really help. It will, however, give you an idea of how much detail might be lost to compression before you actually upload, which is valuable information. If we can get a definitive answer from LL about what settings their JPEG2000 converter is using, this could be very useful.

On a side note, I must say I'm impressed with how well JPEG2000 is able to compress losslessly, and with how smart it is about what areas to compress the most. My 1024x1024 24-bit TGA test images (3MB source) have come out around 1MB, and the 32-bit ones (4MB source) have come out even smaller. The more transparency, the smaller the file, which makes sense since there's nothing that can compress smaller than something that's invisible. Test images at 512x512 (1MB or 768K source) have come out around 200-250K, although the transparency/size relationship is reversed in some instances for reasons I don't understand. Tests at 256x256 (256K or 192K source) have come out at just 70-80K on average. That's an average ratio of between 3-1 and 4-1 at the lossless setting, which is pretty good. Lowering the quality even a little bit decreases that already tiny file size a whole lot.


EDIT: By the way, again I'm sure it goes without saying, but don't save an image as JPEG2000 and then attempt to upload that JPEG2000 to SL. First of all it won't work since SL won't accept JPEG2000 as a source, but even if it did, you still wouldn't wnat to do it. You'd be compressing twice instead of just once, which would cause artifacts. If you install this plugin, still upload TGA's to SL as normal. This plug-in is just a way to preview what your images could look like when converted to the format SL uses.

I'm sorry, Chosen, I had no idea you didn't know about that. I haven't bothered with it, since I don't know what settings SL is using. But yeah, it's there.

Installation instructions are exactly the same for the Mac. Just drag it from the folder it's in to (probably Applications) / Adobe Photoshop CS2 / Plug-Ins / Adobe Photoshop Only / File Formats.

It is on the CS2 disk, of course. And, if you don't have the whole suite (I don't, since I already had 3 of the 4 programs, and they don't offer an upgrade path for that,) you'll find it in Goodies / Optional Plug-Ins / Photoshop Only / File Format. (Along with the MacPaint and Pixel Paint plug-ins, if you have a Mac. Anyone else remember those? ) I'm assuming it's in the same place on the PC disks.

There's all kinds of stuff in that Goodies folder. It's well worth looking into. (Even if you don't have old Mac Paint files that you need to open.) Did you try any of the Channel Mixer presets? Or the High Rez paper textures? I love the rice paper.

Anyway, that's the Mac and CS2 stuff!

Ok, Chosen - I'm now officially bowing at your feet again (I'll steal some time from bowing at Chip's, 'coz he don't use vectors )

I can now continue my experiment - in which I want to verify my suspicion that JPG->JPEG2000 can actually result in slightly larger target files that TGA->JPEG2000.

BTW - I've uploaded a whole lotta test textures for comparison. Does anyone know how to determine the SL JPEG2000 (byte) size?

That wouldn't surprise me. JPG compression is noisy. Noise = more fiddly bits for JPEG 2000 to compress. More fiddly bits to compress = bigger file. Step 5: Profit

Recent versions of Paint Shop Pro also support Jpeg 2000, BTW.

On the Mac "Graphic Converter" can save as .jp2