By: John Michael Pierobon
From newspapers, to driver's licenses, to advertising, photography has certainly changed the way we live and see things.
A few years ago I had dinner at Antoine's in New Orleans. Antoine's is one of the oldest restaurants in America. Inside, framed on the walls, are front pages of newspapers dating back to the past century featuring historical headlines about the war with Mexico, the Civil War, etc.
Some of the newspapers looked strange because they had no pictures. Sometime between the war with Mexico and the Spanish-American War photographs became a common occurence in every newspaper.
Soon it will be common to store all your photographs on a Picture CD. Picture CD is a new service from Kodak. It is simple, easy, and fun.
Here is how it works. The next time you take your 35-mm or Advanced Photo System (APS) film in for processing, including one-time-use cameras, check the box for the Kodak Picture CD. You will get back your prints, negatives, a handy index print, along with a CD that includes your pictures stored as high-resolution (1536 by 1024) digital images plus some neat software which runs on both a PC and a Macintosh.
Your PC should be a Pentium running at 90 MHz or higher, with at least 24 Mbytes of memory, and a 4X speed CD drive. Your Macintosh should be an iMac or have a G3 processor, running MacOS 8.1 or higher, with at least 24 Mbytes of memory, and a 4X speed CD drive.
The fun part starts when the Picture CD is loaded on your computer, for you can do several things to your pictures. You can crop them, enhance the contrast, remove the "red-eye", and with the built-in software digitally alter the photograph with some special effects. Once you are done editing your pictures you can print them out, and send them to your friends and relatives over the Internet.
Editing is easy and very intuitive because the pictures are laid out on a contact sheet you can click on, and functions such as print are just a button away.
The images are stored in the widely accepted JPEG format, which is designed for photographs, and is compatible with sophisticated image editing programs such as Adobe's PhotoDeluxe and Microsoft's PictureIt. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group.
The Picture CD uses imaging technology from Intel. The quality of the images on the Picture CD is very good, and with the ability to touch up the pictures, it makes the pictures appear even better. Also, since the pictures are on a CD, they will last longer.
The cost of a Picture CD is about US$10 more than old fashion processing. This may seem expensive, but it is not when you consider that you get high-resolution digital images without having to buy an expensive digital camera, or a scanner. Also the Picture CD is very convenient because you can make as many reprints as you like without the wait.
The Kodak Picture CD really does let you take pictures further.