Kodak lab scans on CD

[PhilBurton]

Hi Phil, probably an idiotic question, but when you say you tried to read the files, does that mean you were able to view the entire folder structure on the disk?

I tried to read the CD using Windows 10 explorer, but I could not open up the folder containing the images. No PCD files visible.

I'm running Windows 10 also and I've just checked the Kodak Picture CDs I have from 2001. Trying to run the launcher causes my computer to have conniptions and terminate the programme, but I am able to view the contents of the disk in Windows Explorer and, while there's a folder labelled PCD there, there's another directly beneath labelled Pictures and that has my (crummy!) jpg files.
Given that my disks are older, I'd have thought the proprietary format more likely to have been in use back then and updated later to a more user friendly format. I guess not.

If I think back on Kodak's entire digital photo history, it's been one botch after another. Recall that they invented digital photography in 1975. Classic case of "Innovator's Dilemma." By the way, I worked in the disk drive industry in the early 1980s. Kodak was apparently too busy counting the profits from film and printing, and lab processing.

I also have a couple of Agfa CDs from around the same time. Not only are the scans slightly better in quality, their CD Viewer programme still runs perfectly.
Poor Kodak.

Yes, poor Kodak. But they did it to themselves.

 

[tehabe]

I have some PictureCD 6.0 from 2003/04, I used a disposible camera to take these shots, so they are not the sharpest to begin with. The scans where made with something called Kodak CLAS Digital Film Scanner / HR200 which I can't find much on the internet about. Some were not correctly cropped for the scan, it is unlikely someone in the lab looked at those for more than just a few seconds.

i rescanned the negative a while ago with a Plustek OpticFilm 8200i, which a bit too cool for my taste but I couldn't be bothered to fix that.

 

[shijan]

Color could be fixed manually:

 

[tehabe]

Color could be fixed manually:

I know. But I didn't bother when I scanned it. Since then my process of scanning has changed also. I find those differences between the Kodak and Plustek scan interesting but I wonder what this yellow "fog" on the left is.

 

[dokko]

If you‘re still having trouble converting the files, feel free to send me a link with a .zip file and I‘ll try to assist.

 

[tehabe]

I only uploaded the scans because the discussion was about old Kodak PictureCDs and I wanted to show the difference. It was never about the colour of my scans. I might have used weird settings for my scan but I can't remember.

 

[shijan]

Kodak scanner used some sort of compensation for each specific film model as described here http://tedfelix.com/PhotoCD/FilmTermCodes.html
"Film Terms are what some scanner manufacturers call "LUTs" or Look Up Tables. They define color corrections that are needed to make each type of film look right. This is critical for Color Negative films since they require a lot of correction to get a good positive image"
By the way, did anyone know how to convert those numbers into Curves or Levels values?

Plustek software just auto detects some random black and white points and in many cases this is not corresponds to pretty looking final image.

 

[tehabe]

1. I was NOT talking about the colour, please stop talking about the colour of my Plustek scan, it doesn't matter!
2. I wasn't using the Plustek supplied software.

I was just an example of those two scans, also the colours in the Kodak scans are not good either.

 

[Bushcat]

The free and excellent Irfanview has a large set of plugins, including PCD. Just remember to select "base16" when opening a photo, to load the highest-resolution version. It includes a very flexible batch converter.

 

[shijan]

Good news! About a week ago i asked Sandy (developer of pcdtojpeg) for option to export to 16 bit formats and convert to custom output ICC profile. Here is the answer:

"I am planning a new version of pcdtojpeg, and the current plan is that it will include many of the upgrades that you suggest, including profiles, etc."

 

[PhilBurton]

Good news! About a week ago i asked Sandy (developer of pcdtojpeg) for option to export to 16 bit formats and convert to custom output ICC profile. Here is the answer:

"I am planning a new version of pcdtojpeg, and the current plan is that it will include many of the upgrades that you suggest, including profiles, etc."

Great news. Did Sandy say when he would have these options completed?

 

[shijan]

Sandy didn't say about expected release date.

Here is my small recearch about importance of wider color gamuts:
Even if PhotoYCC color gamut is same as sRGB, wider color gamut output makes sense to recover possible hidden data. Here is info from Wiki article:
"This encoding scheme is that it allows Photo CD images to represent colors which are above 100% (up to 140.2%), "whiter than white""
"Kodak expressly allows the use of R, G, B < 0, allowing out-of-gamut (for Rec. 709) colors to be expressed. The effect is similar to xvYCC, which came much later."

To prove theory in real life, i done some tests with PCD example images from https://github.com/wcDogg/test-files/tree/main/Kodak-Photo-CD/pcd and find that some of them have clipping due too saturated colors and too small sRGB color space.
pcdMagic exported to TIFF ProPhotoRGB
pcdtojpeg exported to JPEG sRGB

 

[Kodachromeguy]

I went through this same exercise with mid-1990s Kodak Photo CDs, which may be the same format as 2000s Picture CDs.

https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2023/07/abandoned-early-digital-technology.html

The problem is not just opening the file structure and reading the PCD file. You also need to correct the exaggerated dynamic range that was designed for viewing on a NTSC television. Someone here on Photrio told me about Picture Window Pro 7. I do not know if it has the lookup tables in the software. You need to use the 32 bit version on a Windows computer.

The second issue is the quality of the scanning when the lab first developed film and scanned it. Some of my CDs were pretty mediocre.

 

[PhilBurton]

The second issue is the quality of the scanning when the lab first developed film and scanned it. Some of my CDs were pretty mediocre.

No doubt.

 

[shijan]

Here is another theory from Sandy:
"I very much doubt that there is any clipping in those images. The main difference between pcdtojpeg and pcdMagic renderings is that pcdMagic uses scanner specific color profiles, and pcdtojpeg, at least the current version, does not."

And my side by side test. pcdMagic’s sRGB jpeg and ProPhotoRGB tiff both have no clipping: