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Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Tiles for desktop

Here are a couple of tiles that I made back in the nineties for my web site. I like to use them sometimes for background pattern on my desktop when I want something subtle, but a little more interesting than a plain color.
Please use them only on your own computer, not on a web site.



They are both made from photos I took, the lower one is from leaves from a house birch I had back then, I think.
... Nope, now I remember, it's from this photo.


It was my own photo, and the same type of plant, but not my own, it belonged to the lovely model, Marlene.

... I just discovered something disturbing: for the first time ever, I have lost file formats to time: I can no longer open my old PhotoCD files! At least not in decent size, in Graphic Converter they will open in "base", which is only 768x512 pixels. Probably PhotoCD is long gone, but I honestly did not expect to lose the files this soon. (If you feel like experimenting, here's a file.)
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8 comments:

  1. Bert4 Nov 2008, 04:17:00

    Photoshop CS8 (yeah, it dates, but gets things done for me) offered to open your sample file at resolutions up to 3072x2048, without a hitch... Do you have a lot to convert?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Eolake Stobblehouse4 Nov 2008, 12:52:00

    Not a lot.

    It may have to do with the processor. Thorsten Lemke tells me I can do it if I open GraphicConverter in Rosetta. (I'm still waiting for his answer on how I actually do that though.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous4 Nov 2008, 14:16:00

    There's also Imagemagick, a command line tool for UNIX/linux that can open or convert PCD files.

    I don't know much about it, but I'm sure that with a little digging, you can download it for the mac (look fro a BSD version).

    I converted the file into a tiff thusly:
    gm mogrify -format tiff *PCD

    gm, incidentally is a fork of imagemagick called graphicsmagick. It comes with my distro and I don't know why I have one and not the other.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Eolake Stobblehouse4 Nov 2008, 15:23:00

    OK, the GraphicConverter thing worked, and I've made copies of all of them, converted to photoshop format. (Big files though, but heck, they are pretty selected images.)

    I am struck by how much poorer the image quality of these 35mm pictures are, even though they were scanned professionally, compared to pictures taken digitally today, even with very compact cameras.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous4 Nov 2008, 19:00:00

    Eolake

    You might want to take a look at http://www.tedfelix.com/PhotoCD/index.html

    Apparently pictures can lose highlights when opened or converted outside of the photocd

    ps

    also opened ok in serif photoplus x2

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  6. Eolake Stobblehouse4 Nov 2008, 21:37:00

    Thanks.
    Fortunately the contrast of the scans tend towards low contrast.

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  7. Anonymous6 Nov 2008, 03:33:00

    The wonderful Irfanview will open/display it in all sizes too. You'll need the Kodak Photo CD plug-in (all the 'extra' plug-ins are available in one big EXE for ease of use). Then Options -Properties/Settings -Kodak PCD - Check Box, then File -Reopen.
    http://www.irfanview.net/
    -no connection with Irfanview, except being a happy user.
    -Eric

    ReplyDelete
  8. Eolake Stobblehouse6 Nov 2008, 04:12:00

    Thank you very much.
    Looks like it's a thing like GraphicConverter is on the Mac.

    ReplyDelete