Photo CD

Revision as of 22:08, 12 October 2013

Kodak Photo CD (PCD) is an image file format that was used by products and services which developed photographs by digitizing them and writing them to a CD.

Photo CD files combine six different resolution version of the original image into a single compressed file.

Converting PCD to other formats

PCD files contain multiple resolutions and have other subtitles that tools must be aware of. This page discusses tool support, and recommends pcdtojpeg over ImageMagick which had flaws at that time. It seems that later versions of ImageMagick have dealt with the colour blow-out issues.

Note that, when converting PCD files using ImageMagick, you must manually select the resolution layer you want. e.g.

$ convert BlownJohn.pcd[0] BlownJohn-0.png
$ convert BlownJohn.pcd[1] BlownJohn-1.png
$ convert BlownJohn.pcd[2] BlownJohn-2.png
$ convert BlownJohn.pcd[3] BlownJohn-3.png
$ convert BlownJohn.pcd[4] BlownJohn-4.png
$ convert BlownJohn.pcd[5] BlownJohn-5.png
$ convert BlownJohn.pcd[6] BlownJohn-6.png
$ convert BlownJohn.pcd[7] BlownJohn-7.png
$ convert BlownJohn.pcd[8] BlownJohn-8.png

However, examining the results, we can see that some of these are the same:

$ ls -l BlownJohn-?.png
     52322  BlownJohn-0.png
     52322  BlownJohn-1.png
    191840  BlownJohn-2.png
    707221  BlownJohn-3.png
   2476659  BlownJohn-4.png
   9668328  BlownJohn-5.png
  28572165  BlownJohn-6.png
  28572165  BlownJohn-7.png
  28572165  BlownJohn-8.png

i.e. (0,1) are identical, as are (6,7,8), with (1) being the lowest resolution and (6) being the highest. This is consistent with the six resolutions that should be present in the PCD. For the highest resolution, use this:

$ convert BlownJohn.pcd[6] BlownJohn.png

The pcd2html tool may also be useful.

External Links

• Wikipedia article
• Kodak Photo CD web page