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> Of course digital cameras do a lot of processing on the captured sensor data. They don't, though. Oh, the awful camera in a smartphone does, because the sen

by retrac 3y ago

> Of course digital cameras do a lot of processing on the captured sensor data. They don't, though. Oh, the awful camera in a smartphone does, because the sensor is so tiny and there's barely any lens. But classically speaking with a "real" digital camera? No, there is no further processing. The values for each pixel are a measurement of the intensity of the light falling on the sensor. It is true that further processing might be necessary anyway. Some sensors do not correlate easily to RGB displays and their raw data may not be displayable on any device without deinterlacing, dithering, and transformations where one sensor pixel does not translate directly to one display pixel. But even doing that sort of conversion automatically is controversial, which is why most dedicated digital cameras provide access to the raw sensor data.

foldr 3y ago
>there's barely any lens Smartphone lenses are very sophisticated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30557578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30557578 "Phones do an enormous amount of image processing today of course, but as far as I can tell, not much of that is actual optical correction because the lens, while tiny, is already optically pretty sharp and good thanks to the highly exotic design."
dagmx 3y ago
You’re over simplifying. All sensors will do some amount of signal processing before the photosite readouts are written to memory. Lots of people assume RAW means just that, but raw usually just means pre-debayering. There may still be some amount of noise reduction applied prior to this step. This was a huge deal for Sony sensors and astrophotography for a hot minute.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  > Sony sensors and astrophotography for a hot minute. That was a different issue: they were using a lossy compression algorithm for RAW photos that couldn't preserve single bright pixels.
AlotOfReading 3y ago
Raws still have processing done before the "sensor values" are stored, notably dead pixel elimination. It's just (significantly) less processing than the corresponding JPEG gets as most of the processing is deferred until you import it into your editor of choice.

by retrac 3y ago

foldr 3y ago

>there's barely any lens Smartphone lenses are very sophisticated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30557578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30557578 "Phones do an enormous amount of image processing today of course, but as far as I can tell, not much of that is actual optical correction because the lens, while tiny, is already optically pretty sharp and good thanks to the highly exotic design."

dagmx 3y ago

You’re over simplifying. All sensors will do some amount of signal processing before the photosite readouts are written to memory. Lots of people assume RAW means just that, but raw usually just means pre-debayering. There may still be some amount of noise reduction applied prior to this step. This was a huge deal for Sony sensors and astrophotography for a hot minute.

jiggawatts 3y ago
> Sony sensors and astrophotography for a hot minute. That was a different issue: they were using a lossy compression algorithm for RAW photos that couldn't preserve single bright pixels.

AlotOfReading 3y ago

Raws still have processing done before the "sensor values" are stored, notably dead pixel elimination. It's just (significantly) less processing than the corresponding JPEG gets as most of the processing is deferred until you import it into your editor of choice.