One of the first rolls of APS film I scanned was also one I had Kodak make a photo CD of when I had them developed some years ago. This gave me a good opportunity to compare the raw scan to what Kodak does to what I can do with either the Nikon scan software or Photoshop.

First, here are the pics:

Kodak	Nikon Scan	Nikon Scan w/ Brightness +50 Contrast +30

Some observations:

The Kodak one (which is roughly equivalent to what a 1 (one) megapixel camera would take) is very pink — you can see from the clouds and shading of the wood deck. However, it is the one where the color does pop out and (IMHO) looks better. The middle one is the scan with no processing (besides the digital ICE). It’s also the darkest and most plain. The third is the scan with brightness cranked up +50 (on a range of -100 to +100) and contract to +30. This seems a bit better, but the colors are still very washed… although I imagine that may be more true to life.

The scan pictures also show the graininess more than the Kodak JPG, which is interesting. This may just be in the downconversion from the full scan (a TIFF file) to a JPG… time for some more scanning. But this does show pretty clearly that Kodak’s magic for processing does do a pretty decent job!