Kodak Negative Discs

Did you ever own a Disc Negative camera? In the 80s and for a few years, Kodak had a line of cameras that put  very small negatives onto a circular disk that resembles an old ViewMaster disk. Each disk had 15 pictures spaced around its circumference.

I had one of those cameras for awhile and ran across a few disks today. The negatives are so small, I could not even tell what was in the pictures. I first Googled to see if there are services that would transfer the images to a CD or at least print them. There are few places. My first thought was to send the disks I found today and have all of their images transferred to a CD.

I immediately went to Plan B once I discovered how mach that would cost. From my quick research, it appears that it would cost about $20 per Negative Disc. Here is the link to one company that provides such a service.

   http://www.pixmonix.com/110-126-disc-disk-negative-scanning.php

My Plan B was to scan the disks with my Epson V500 scanner. I put the disk into one of the larger negative holders that came with the scanner and used Vuescan to do the actual scanning.

Here is what a single frame scan looks like.

After cropping, straightening, etc in PSE 7, I was able to isolate images that are about the size from a 1-2 Mp camera. However, the quality is nowhere near that. The images will make a 4×6 print with reasonable quality and size wise are suitable for PC screen display or slide show DVDs. Below is an example of one of the pictures after enhancing it in PSe 7.

 

Now that I know how to do it, I will see what is on the other Disc Negatives I d found.

Until next time,

Don

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New Class Handouts Pages

For those of you who are students of mine, you will notice that I have updated the handouts for the spring term. The pages cover the the classes I will be teaching this spring at both the South Bay Adult School and the Torrance Adult Center at Griffith.

They are password protected, and you will be given your password on the first day of class.

Until next time,

Don

Update Camera Raw Converter

The Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) is the plug-in within Photoshop Elements (and Photoshop for that matter)  that allows PSE to open and edit camera raw files.  

As new cameras are introduced they often change their raw file format or other inner workings that affect the raw image file written to the memory card. Adobe updates the ACR to accomodate the change. I normally did not worry about making sure I had the latest ACR, as long as my camera raw files could be opened and edited with whatever version of ACR I had installed. However, on occasion Adobe makes improvements to the ACR that are incorporated into the latest version that add to its capabilities.  So you need to occasionally check with the Adobe web site to see if a new version is available.  Here is the link  to the ACR Download page. Here is the link to the Readme file that describes how to download and install the new ACR.

The latest version is ACR 5.3, which was just released. Even if you have recently purchased PSE 7, you may not have this latest version. For example, I believe my PSE 7 (October vintage) came with ACR 5.1, but I am not certain of that. I do know I have updated it at least twice  since then. Also, unlike CS4, clicking on Help and then Updates apparently does not let you know about the new update. When I did this, it said my PSE 7 had all of the latest updates. To find out the version of ACR currently installed, open a image in the ACR and look in the upper left hand corner where you will see the version number.

 Also, this latest update is  compatible with with PSE 6, and Premiere Elements 4.0 and 7.0. However, you have to copy the file itself into the appropriate folders in each one of these programs. This is all explained in the Readme file. If you recently bought a new camera, you definitely want to upgrade to the latest version. Otherwise you may not be able to read the raw files from your new camera.

The picture above is a recent panorama  comprised of four images of the downtown Los Angeles taken from Kenneth Hahn Recreational Area. I need to return there after a rain. I suspect the view will be even more spectacular.

 Until next time,

Don