subject: How Digital Cameras Process Their Images [print this page] How Digital Cameras Process Their Images How Digital Cameras Process Their Images
Digital cameras, basically work the same as a traditional camera. Both cameras use the same lens for focusing on specific images, it also has a shutter to let light go inside the camera, and an aperture for controlling the amount of light that will go inside the camera.
The only and main difference they have is the process in which they capture and process those images. While the traditional kind can capture the images as soon as the button is clicked the images would be processed on film, a digital camera on the other hand, will process the images on an image sensor and would need a computer or a printer to finally get the images. While conventional cameras depend on chemical and mechanical processes and would not even need any electricity to operate and process them, digital cameras on the other hand, depend on their built-in computer, and their images are recorded electronically.
Although traditional cameras still provide better picture quality than digital cameras, they are still used by some until now. But as traditional cameras do not process the same as digital cameras, the popularity of the latter has increasingly become more. To process the images in a digital camera , it will need its electronic devices that are composed of photosites in which it will calculate the intensity of light and thus processing its image sensors. There are two types of image sensors which are commonly used. They are the CCD or the Charge coupled Device and the CMOS or the Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor sensors.
For a digital camera each photosite means a pixel in terms of the final image. A digital camera having a six megapixel would mean 6 million megapixels. The light that hits the image sensor will then get converted into electrical signals and then process them into binary numbers by a computer that is built-in the camera itself, which then result into storing the image in the digital camera or in the memory card. The photosites can only process the intensity of light and not process the colour of the images. In order to create the colours it needs, the photosites will be covered with red, green or blue colour filters.
Most of the time the colour filter can only cover one colour at a time. So the processing of the images will rely on its computer processing, which is called as demosaicing. After the process of demosaicing is complete, the images would then be adjusted according to the digital camera settings for colour saturation, brightness and contrast.
