Panchromatic pixels in sensor arrays

A friend pointed me to a Kodak announcement about new filter-array patterns for digital camera sensors. In short, what they do is to add panchromatic pixels to the filter array patterns.

I don't see a breakthrough because adding specialized pixels (for luminosity in this case) is an obvious evolution when you have increased pixel densities in sensors and lower prices. Previously, in contrast, a lot of thought had to go into designing filter array patterns to capture both luminosity and color resolution with many less pixels.

Today one can have 16 mega pixels in a 35mm sensor, which is the resolution of 35mm film. Each additional mega pixel can be used to capture more and more specific information, and nothing prevents manufacturers from using sensors lager than 35mm.

The days of film as the paradigm of captured image quality are over.

Dead Fish

RAW Mode

The less, the better

According to Wikipedia:

A raw image file contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of a digital camera or image scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed and ready to use by a bitmap graphics editor, printed, or displayed by a typical web browser. The image must be processed and converted to an RGB format such as TIFF^? or JPEG^? before it can be manipulated.

Actually, today many image browsers and editors are able to process the RAW image formats of leading camera vendors.

• Microsoft's "RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP" allows you to view thumbnails and use the Picture Viewer application over RAW files.
• Google's Picasa now supports various RAW image formats, from indexing to editing.
• Adobe's Lightroom project will provide professional-quality cataloguing and editing for images in RAW format.
• The latest versions of the software that comes bundled with digital cameras allows for basic editing of RAW images. Such is the case with my camera^?.

As I see it, the digital RAW is the equivalent of the film negative, and there's no way to go if you're serious about your photography than to shoot and transfer your pictures in RAW format.

For a nice explanation of the whys and the trade-offs, read the Understanding Raw Files article by photographer Michael Reichmann.

Black and White

The lost beauty

My first serious attempts at good fotography where with black and white. I cannot tell now if it was the artistic nature of B&W of photography or it's easiness over budget which dominated, but I'm sure both were involved.

Today, I'm getting my self ready to try B&W again using a My Camera^?, so I've been doing a bit of study.

If you like B&W photograply, you should stop by photographer Keith Cooper's site and read some of his excellent articles about digital B&W photography. They are all hyperlinked, and almost any article is a good starting point.

Dicho eso, Marcelo dice:

Lamentablemente, las sutilezas que hacen el B&W ser tan bello, se perderan con el pasar del tiempo, como se perdio la belleza del daguerrotipo, como se perdio lo rico del los bajas frecuencias de los discos de vinyl, lo agradable de los instrumentos barrocos. Asi es la vida.

Yo no he experimentado mucho con blanco y negro en photoshop, pero he jugado un poco con lo de los filtros. Pero me refiero a filtros de colores (como el anarajado) que se ponen en el lente de la camara, para resaltar los tonos grises… bueno me puse a jugar en photoshop poniendole un layer anaranjado casi transparente, encima de una foto a color, y luego la converti a grayscale, y le salieron unos tonos grises bellos.

Como en muchas otras expresiones de arte, no hay reglas precisas de como hacer las cosas. Depende del artista, de como usa las herramientas que tiene disponibles.