Can You Picture This?

By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT CAMDEN

Starting this month, Americans taking their vacation snapshots to be developed will be offered a choice that may seem mystifying. In addition to the usual range of options -- from color slides to jumbo prints -- they will be invited to have their pictures scanned by a computer and stored on a "Photo CD" -- a compact disc that looks just like one that might play the latest Guns N' Roses release but in fact stores all the shots of the kids and the Grand Canyon in digital form. These newfangled photo albums hold up to 100 images, stored for a fee of about $1 a frame. They can be viewed, without risk of fading or fraying, on an ordinary television set using a special CD player.

Eastman Kodak is betting that Photo CDs will eventually become as familiar to photographers around the world as its bright yellow boxes of film. It has succeeded in persuading such competitors as Fuji, Agfa and Konica to agree to one standard for the discs, although Kodak is first to offer the product. What the company envisions is a future in which devices that play Photo CDs -- which also double as music CD players -- have become standard equipment in home entertainment centers, alongside the stereo, the TV and the VCR. Kodak pictures families gathered in living rooms to see photos displayed on TV screens -- and, eventually, on high-resolution HDTV.

The more creative photographers will have the chance to load Photo CD images into home computers and turn their Macs and PCs into electronic darkrooms, where they can create studio-quality pictures that might be printed on color printers, turned into Christmas cards or sent to friends and relatives over ordinary phone lines. Adventurous types will even be able to manipulate the digitized images, pixelediting crazy Uncle Harry out of a shot, for example, or grafting his head onto Fido's body.

It could, however, be a tough sell. Few Americans own computers powerful enough to manipulate images, and even fewer have the equipment needed to retrieve pictures stored on a compact disc (a Philips CD Interactive system will do it, as will some CD-ROM computer drives). Kodak sells a $400 Photo CD player that reads both music and photographic compact discs, but until such devices are widely used, the company is likely to be caught in a classic chicken-and-egg marketing bind: people won't want to spend $25 to have their pictures put on a disc they cannot play, and few will want to buy the player without a library of discs to view.

Still, there is something about the Kodak idea that has the aura of inevitability. Photo CD is the public's first glimpse of a technological revolution that has been developing for more than a decade. Like music, text and telephones, photography is going digital. What was once a purely chemical process -- by which crystals of silver halide were exposed to light and turned into visual representations (or analogs) of an actual scene -- is being transformed into an electronic process that turns the same information into strings of 0s and 1s.

The pictures may look the same -- at least to the untrained eye. Purists point out that Photo CD images contain only about 18 million pixels (picture elements), which is roughly equivalent to the visual information represented by the 20 million silver molecules in a standard 35-mm negative. But that is about one-fifth the resolution offered by high-quality Kodachrome slides, and it cannot compare with the glorious large-format pictures that Ansel Adams labored to create.

The main advantage will be that hundreds of digital images can be stored on an optical disk and sorted in a flash. They can be recopied endlessly, each new image a perfect replica of the old. They can be transmitted anywhere in the world at nearly the speed of light. And they can be called to a computer screen and cropped, tinted, sharpened or shaded on the fly, giving photo editors at their workstations a taste of the power that writers sitting at their word processors have enjoyed for years.

The same technology permits businesses and government agencies to replace rooms full of documents with stacks of computer disks. American Express converts all its paper receipts into digital form for printing and storage. Empire Blue Cross & Blue Shield in New York City uses the process to make digital images of 250,000 claims a day. Even police departments are beginning to use the technology for storing mug shots and fingerprints. Digital-image management is already a $1.8 billion industry, and could grow to $11 billion in North America by 1996, according to BIS Strategic Decisions, a Massachusetts-based consulting firm.

In the hands of an artist, the tools of digital imaging offer a whole new creative medium -- one that combines the realism of photography with the malleability of oil paints. Once an image is converted to digital form, it can be loaded into a computer and manipulated by any number of software tools. Spots and blemishes can be erased or smoothed over. Shadows can be deepened or lightened. Images can be cloned, combined, sharpened or blurred and then painted from a palette of more than 16 million hues. The final product can be put to paper on a new generation of color printers that spit out enlargements nearly indistinguishable from those created in a darkroom.

Nowhere is the power of these tools more palpable than at Kodak's Center for Creative Imaging, a converted brass foundry in Camden, Maine. Since the center opened last year under the direction of Ray DeMoulin, a 38-year Kodak veteran, more than 2,000 designers, illustrators, graphic artists and professional photographers have made the pilgrimage to immerse themselves in the new technology. Among those who have come to play at the center's 90 (mostly Macintosh) workstations are photographer Richard Avedon, graphic designer Milton Glaser and illustrator Jean-Michel Folon. (It was here that photographer Gregory Heisler created the Ted Turner-CNN composite that illustrated TIME's Man of the Year cover.)

Apple Computer chairman John Sculley likes to compare the center to Florence during the Renaissance. In truth, the artistry, so far, is rather long on surrealistic special effects and short on subtlety, as explorers of the medium check out every tool in their new bag of tricks. "We're at the early stages of what may be a paradigm shift, and a lot of this stuff will look clunky," says Charles Altschul, a Yale design professor who serves as the center's director of education. "But you can feel the artists' creativity beginning to poke through."

Much is riding on Kodak's venture into digital imaging. Although the photo giant still dominates the market for film and photographic paper, the long- term future of film technology is far from certain. There are already electronic cameras on the market, including one made by Kodak, that take digital pictures without using film. The results look fine on a TV screen, but the prints are of poor quality. What Photo CD does, Kodak executives say, is give the owners of the world's 250 million conventional film cameras the best of both technologies: high-quality prints and low-cost input devices for the new digital systems.