In the Spring of 1998 I conceived a monumental project: copying my grandmother's photo collection. My grandmother was nearing her 90th birthday and I was spending a bit of time with her, helping organize her things from multiple bouts of moving and trying to learn more about her. One of the great treasure-troves she has to share with all of her grandchildren is her photo collection of her family growing up, and I realized that these photos would someday be divided up between us or lost or we'd never know who was in the photos.
So began my project. My first goal was that the photos should be made available to anyone who wanted them, including my grandmother's large extended family who's grandparents and great-grandparents are featured in these photos. As a technophile, I thought that digital copies were the obvious answer, provided that the quality wasn't compromised. I had originally hoped to distribute the photos in the Kodak Photo CD format, which has excellent quality and can be read on most new personal computers. But the proprietary Kodak format makes it impossible to delete unwanted images (duplicates or poor photos on the master Photo CD) or re-arrange the photo order before copying. Photo CDs may only be copied as is, since there are no consumer-grade graphics programs that can create the Image-Pac format.
The release and popularity of the Kodak Picture CD using the standard JPEG image format came to my rescue. By using the Kodak CD format, I hope to make the CDs attractive to all of my extended family, whether or not they have a personal computer, since images can be viewed printed at Kodak Picture Maker kiosks.
The time honored way to copy photographs (if you don't have the original negatives) is by creating copy negatives. The essence of copy negatives is that a high-quality photo is taken of your original photo, creating a new negative.
Copy negatives are usually made by professional photo studios and cost upwards of $1.50 per image, plus print costs. This may not seem like much for one photo, but I was looking at hundreds. Professional copy negatives are shot with view cameras on 4x5" negatives, large enough to capture all of the quality of the original.
Unfortunately, since I wanted to transfer the copy negatives to the Kodak Photo CD format, my negatives had to be the 35mm size. I knew that the Photo CD scan quality was high enough to negate any loss of quality in the smaller negative, but no professional studio would shoot the negatives in that size. A new Kodak Photo CD Pro format is now available to copy the larger size negatives, at a proportionally larger cost. Kodak Picture CD scan quality is considerably lower than the Photo CD, so I have continued to have my 35mm negatives processed as Photo CDs.
Creating copy negatives is a pretty simple process, as long as you don't mind being blinded. Creating copy negatives requires a small, moderate quality copy stand, usually available for artists who need to photograph their work to send slides to galleries. A moderate quality stand will use four 3200K light bulbs and have three orientations of adjustment. An old, or basic, 35mm SLR camera is best since newer cameras may have difficulty auto-focusing. A lens hood will keep the light glare out of your lens and an 80A color correction filter is necissary for the extreme color temperature of the lights. Though most of my original photos were Black & White, I used the Kodak PJ100 color film (devised especially for scanning), since Kodak will not transfer B&W film to their CD formats.
What you need:
The Kodak Picture CD format saved my project. Like the Photo CD, Kodak made sure that the format can be read on most personal computers and CD-ROM drives, plus the Kodak Picture Maker kiosks. But the Picture CD uses the standardized JPEG image format which can be created by all major image software.
*NOTE*: I have not checked whether Kodak Picture Maker kiosks will read progressive JPEG images.
To create a Picture CD, you will need:
Kodak Picture Maker kiosks (and many other drives) do not support CD-RW cds.
Kodak Picture CD images must be in the JPEG format, though they can be any size and any resolution. Pictures must be stored in a sub-directory of the disc titled "PICTURES". Data may be stored on the CD at the top level or in another directory. *Total number of photos possible is unknown. Kodak Picture CDs and Photo CDs contain only 100 images.*
When you get to burning your CD, it must be in the ISO 9660 format and the files must not include any Macintosh extention information. CDs may be burned in either the CD-ROM or CD-ROM XA formats, and multisession CDs will work at the Picture Maker kiosks.
That's it. :)
Remember, however, that the CD you have just created only contains images, and not any of the desktop software provided on Picture CD discs from Kodak. If you wish for your CD to contain desktop software, you will need to add that at the top level of your CD. No software is required to read the images at the Kodak Picture Maker kiosk or any Apple computer running the Macintosh system 8.0 or higher.
My original goal was to make Kodak Photo CDs, using the original Photo CDs as source material. This became a huge nightmare as information about Photo CD is hard to find, out of date, or obtuse. The only hard fact I've found about Photo CDs is that the images are stored in a proprietary Image-Pac format. This format allows the image to be stored as a single file that can be de-compressed into a variety of pre-programmed image sizes. Image Pac sizes are denoted as Base over 64 (64x96), Base over 16 (128x192), Base over 4 (256x384), Base (512x768), 4 Base (1024x1536), 16 Base (2048x3072), and 64 Base (4096x6144). Despite the naming convention, the 4 Base size has 1:1 compression, and so appears to be the primary size.
A sneak look at a Kodak Photo CD also shows a hidden directory, called CDI. This directory contains an application, executables, and many files for various language interfaces. This directory many be related to the Slide Show program, or it may be part of the software that converts Image-Pac files into their sized folders. This folder may indicate that the disks are in the Sony-Philips CDi format, which requires special authoring software.
The manual for Toast 4 CD buring software mentions that a CD format called Multi-track CD-ROM is used only for photo CDs, but does not specify if this is Kodak Photo CDs.
The following links may be helpful if you are curious about Photo CD: