Have you moved them off of the CD and on to your hard drive? If not, you need to do that first. Then see if you can open them in Elements and resave as PSDs.
If they’re already on your hard drive and won’t convert to PSD, try another format like TIFF or even JPEG. If you can get them to one of those, then you could go back and change them again to PSD. Or, if you can get them to TIFF, you could just leave them in that format, because it’s also non-lossy and supports layers.
To echo Beth, you must open a .pcd file first.
There are 5 embedded resolutions in each file, and you choose the rez you want at which to open:
192×128 (72KB)
384×256 (288KB)
768×512 (1.125MB)
1536×1024 (4.5MB)
3072×2048 (18MB)
Then you can save as .psd, .tif, .jpg, whatever.
Mac
Thanks for the tips. I’ll let you know how it works out.
I was able to save the files after all. I tried saving as high res JPEG files to my hard drive with the same pixel dimensions as the originals (3072×2048 pixels, 18MB, 300ppi). Then I was able to save each JPEG as a PSD with the same dimensions. Not sure where I went wrong in the first place but everything’s now OK. Thanks again.
Cut out the JPG middle step, save directly to PSD.
No sense throwing out quality with the very first step.
Mac
