How Digital Cameras see the world - Bayer filters, JPEG vs RAW

We take a look at how a digital camera works and the software and processing that is carried out to produce a photo from the original sensor data.

We explore the differences between the sensors RAW data and a JPEG file.

We use Raw Therapee to demosaic a picture and take a look at the Bayer pattern captured by the camera’s sensor.

We look at how the camera on senses light and is in fact monochrome/greyscale. We cover how the Bayer filter is used to allow the colour to also be captured.

An 8 bit JPEG is very different to a 12-bit or 14-bit raw file.

A JPEG can only hold 16.7 Million colours per pixel, whereas 12-bit raw is 68 Billion and a 14-bit raw file is 4.3 Trillion.