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07-30-2014, 06:56 AM   #1
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Restoring old Kodak Photo CDs

This is in reference to an old proprietary file format used by Kodak. Kodak produced the cds as a separate service, before it became obsolete sometime in the 1990's. These cds were different from the cds of jpgs made from scans during in store development that we are familiar with these days.

Having a clean up, found what I thought was lost- a set of the Kodak Photo CDs that I had made in Melbourne Australia in 1994 containing 400 photos from scans of the negs taken in 1980's to early 1990's.
The photos were taken on my Pentax ME Super with the SMC Pentax -M 1:2 50mm and a Tamron 70~200mm zoom. That was the extent of my gear in those days! I got the Tamron which was a bit larger and heavier, but about half the price of the SMC Pentax-M Zoom 80~200mm f/4.5.

The Kodak pcd format was never popular with consumers and became extinct. There is some tech info on internet.
In those days the photo cds were played on a Kodak cd player to a TV.
In Australia the TVs scanned with the PAL protocol.
In about 1996 I recall getting an upgraded computer that could slowly load and display the .pcd images.

The .pcd file format contained a pyramid of six images of varying resolution from thumbnail to the top image of 3072 by 2048 pixels. That top image is of course the one to convert
to modern file formats.

On Linux, Imagemagick site has the command lines for .pcd conversion.
Because I want to do some post sharpening and level adjustments, after some experimenting i came up with a batch conversion script.

This conversion up samples from the 3 by 8 bit depth of the original .pcd to 32 bit floating point tiffs. This is necessary because the script slightly sharpens in the frequency domain after a Fourier transform of the image. (refer my other thread)

Compared to the 35mm C41 neg scans I am getting today off the PrimeFilmPro120 scanner, the old Kodak scans are mediocre.
I suppose for a few reasons:
-I used Kodak C41 iso 400 almost always in those days. - fine for 5 by 7 prints but I now know that the Ektar 100 and Fuji iso 160 and 200 have less grain and scan better than iso 400.

-I tended to take more photos in low light without flash and wider apertures than i do these days. Looking at some of the old photos I can see I would use the Pentax 50/2 and tha Tamron wide open as necessary.

-The Kodak scans have no dust and scratch reduction.
-With no info on the scanner, I suspect it was not as sharp as the PrimeFilmPro120.

-From the .pcd metadata I can see the frames were scanned with an inverse gamma of 0.45 (2.22) whereas i use 0.68 today (1.47) for Fuji C41. This would boost the contrast if not corrected and I think this was to do with display on crt TVs, I have to read more.
I presume the ImageMagick conversion takes this into account.

So far I have batch converted one cd of 100 photos to tiffs using a script to do the batch unattended with a standard sharpening level. That took about 8 hours overnight mainly due to the Fourier sharpening routine.

The results are a lot better than the original .pcd files that I can open here in OpenOffice Impress .
I will post some non-family ones samples when I sort some.

Would be interested to hear from anybody else who has recovered the old Kodak .pcd files

07-30-2014, 07:34 AM   #2
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Been there done that.
If you have a copy of Photoshop CS3 or older it will read that Photo CD file format with the Photo CD.8BI plug-in. I believe that CS2 is available as a free download from Adobe but you will need to research that.

M
07-30-2014, 07:35 AM   #3
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QuoteOriginally posted by Miguel Quote
Been there done that.
How was the image quality?
07-30-2014, 07:42 AM   #4
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QuoteOriginally posted by wombat2go Quote
How was the image quality?
Considering they were basic 135mm film shots taken in 1983 & scanned in the early 90s, I was able to clean them up and convert to Tiff to get acceptable 8x10 prints in 2003. I've been thinking about revisiting those files as everything is so much better now including my post skills.

M

07-30-2014, 07:54 AM   #5
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Thanks Miguel,
yes, you should do that. I will be interested in your results.

I am finding today that 13 files out of 100 refuse to convert, yet they open OK as native .pcds. Not sure why yet, trying some changes to the conversion.

I am thinking that there will be very few Pentax users familiar with this format.
Firstly they need to be of a certain age to know about that 24 year old technology , and then astute enough ( perhaps some would say "crazy geek' enough) to have been motivated to use it.
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