Good read. Funny how I always thought the sensor read rgb, instead of simple light levels in a filter pattern.

This is why I don’t say I need to edit my photos, but instead I need to process them. Editing is clearly understood by the layperson as Photoshop and while they don’t understand processing necessarily, many people still understand taking photos to a store and getting them processed from the film to a photo they can give someone.

This write-up is really, really good. I think about these concepts whenever people discuss astrophotography or other computation-heavy photography as being fake software generated images, when the reality of translating the sensor data with a graphical representation for the human eye (and all the quirks of human vision, especially around brightness and color) needs conscious decisions on how those charges or voltages on a sensor should be translated into a pixel on digital file.

Good post! Always nice to see actual technology on this sub.

How do you get a sensor data image from a camera?

Not sure how worth mentioning it is considering how good the overall write up is.

Even though the human visual system has a non-linear perception of luminance. The camera data needs to be adjusted because the display has a non-linear response. The camera data is adjusted to make sure it appears linear to the displays face. So it’s display non-uniform response that is being corrected, not the human visual system.

There is a bunch more that can be done and described.

I'm a little confused on how the demosaicing step produced a green-tinted photo. I understand that there are 2x green pixels, but does the naive demosaic process just show the averaged sensor data which would intrinsically have "too much" green, or was there an error with the demosaicing?

I think the penultimate photo looks better than the final one that has the luminance and stuff balanced, but maybe that's just me.

#nofilter

Added https://maurycyz.com/index.xml to my feed reader!

Is this you? If so, my wife wonders what camera and software you used!

That's crazy.

Fake dear head

Everything in the article notwithstanding (and it is true), even the notion that any image getting posted anywhere being "unprocessed" is hugely spurious even before you get into digital. As anyone who as ever developed film knows, during the development process you also have a huge amount of influence on how the final print will turn out.

In fact, come to think of it, that's probably why it's called a "process."

Anyway, Pierre over there with his beret and turtleneck and his designer spectacles thinks doing no postprocessing on his images makes him "more purist," or whatever the fuck.

I post unpostprocessed images (with several rather glaringly obvious exceptions) because I enjoy getting the initial output from the camera as close to what I wanted to begin with because that allows me to be lazy.

We are not the same.

There’s nothing that happens when you adjust the contrast or white balance in editing software that the camera hasn’t done under the hood. The edited image isn’t “faker” then the original: they are different renditions of the same data.

You can still carefully choose which renditions you want to put out to the public to manipulate people's perceptions. The video of the uber self-driving car hitting a person being an example that comes to mind, where the video released by uber looks far darker than how human would typically perceive the same street while driving, which led to a lot of "even a human driver would have hit them" apologia. So even if "fake' isn't technically accurate, its still lying to the naive viewer.

Regardless, cool breakdown of what does into making digital photography work at a basic level.

Cool. Reminds me a little bit of literary interpretation. There's no such thing as "just reading what's there", everyone interprets.

This is part of why it’s so silly that people use the RGB values of pixels in an image to argue about the colour of real life objects.

I really enjoyed reading this. I kinda guessed this is what went on behind the scenes but it's nice to have everything layed out step by step.

Very interesting