A study in colour - Part 4: Capturing colour
Houseboats in Victoria, BC. Taken in 2020 with my Panasonic FZ2500 bridge camera. How, exactly, do digital cameras capture colour? We know that the digital sensor is the physical device that receives light in the form of an image from the lens, but how does that translate from photons to pixels? The answer lies in photo cells arranged in something called a Bayer array. See the image below. A 20 mp sensor has 20 million pixels, each pixel is made of 4 wells that provide colour data. The Bayer array is the backbone of the digital imaging industry. Although there are other ways of getting coloured pixel information, this method is by far the most commonly used. The sensor does not produce an image directly. Rather, that job belongs to the camera's CPU, where the information is processed into whatever file type is selected. Jpegs, as mentioned in a previous blog, use 8 bit per channel encoding, where a value from 0-255 is assigned for each of ...