My camera has a 14-bit ADC. Can it accurately record information lower than 14 stops below full scale? Can it store sub-LSB signals in the raw data?
With a well designed sensor the answer, unsurprisingly if you’ve followed the last few posts, is yes it can. The key to being able to capture such tiny visual information in the raw data is a well behaved imaging system with a properly dithered ADC. Continue reading Sub Bit Signal
In the last few posts I have made the case that Image Quality in a digital camera is entirely dependent on the light Information collected at a sensor’s photosites during Exposure. Any subsequent processing – whether analog amplification and conversion to digital in-camera and/or further processing in-computer – effectively applies a set of Information Transfer Functions to the signal that when multiplied together result in the data from which the final photograph is produced. Each step of the way can at best maintain the original Information Quality (IQ) but in most cases it will degrade it somewhat.
This point is key: in a well designed imaging system** the final image IQ is only as good as the scene information collected at the sensor’s photosites, independently of how this information is stored in the working data along the processing chain, on its way to being transformed into a pleasing photograph. As long as scene information is properly encoded by the system early on, before being written to the raw file – and information transfer is maintained in the data throughout the imaging and processing chain – final photograph IQ will be virtually the same independently of how its data’s histogram looks along the way.
Continue reading Image Quality: Raising ISO vs Pushing in Conversion
My camera sports a 14 stop Engineering Dynamic Range. What bit depth do I need to safely fully encode all of the captured tones from the scene with a linear sensor? As we will see the answer is not 14 bits because that’s the eDR, but it’s not too far from that either – for other reasons, as information science will show us in this article.
When photographers talk about grayscale ‘tones’ they typically refer to the number of distinct gray levels present in a displayed image. They don’t want to see distinct levels in a natural slow changing gradient like a dark sky: if it’s smooth they want to perceive it as smooth when looking at their photograph. So they want to make sure that all possible tonal information from the scene has been captured and stored in the raw data by their imaging system.
This is a recurring nightmare for a new photographer: they head out with their brand new state-of-the art digital camera, capture a set of images with a vast expanse of sky or smoothly changing background, come home, fire them up on their computer, play with a few sliders and … gasp! … there are visible bands (posterization, stairstepping, quantization) all over the smoothly changing gradient. ‘Is my new camera broken?!’, they wonder in horror.
Relax, chances are very (very) good that the camera is fine. I am going to show you in this post how to make sure that that is indeed the case and hone in on the real culprit(s). Continue reading I See Banding in the Sky. Is my Camera Faulty?