Camera Labs

Hi All,

I wanted to engage the Camera Labs community with a technical question and shared art and technical learning experiences.

Digital camera's use a color filter array, most commonly a Bayer filter arrangement in recording a raw color image. However this raw image must be further post processed, typically by the camera's on board image processor or raw processor on your personal computer. These software based algorithms do the heavy lifting of translating this color mosaic into a demosaiced image that we are so accustomed.

I was thinking, can a photographer make use of the raw output to make their own interpretation of the photograph, either in the form of a mosaic or hand-processed demosaic.

Thus spawned the 'challenge' and learning experience.

Below we see a crop (400% enlarged to show array) from a raw image as extracted from a raw file:


Now here is the resulting reconstructed image (similarly 400% enlarged), as performed by dcraw:


Now how would a human being"raw process" this Bayer array mosaic?

I look forward to interesting interpretations and technical ingenuity!

Kind Regards.

Okay, so I've tried to come up with some attempts at hand debayering the image. Here's one of them:



Steps involved were to first make a layer copy, calling it "Color layer" changed the blending mode to "overlay"

Then on the layer below the "color layer" I used the b&w filter layer
and applied a b&w filter using an adjustment layer with following parameters (note that yellows, cyans & magentas values do not change anything about the image since the picture is truly an RGB image):

Reds = 122
Greens = 109
Blues = 125

these values were selected as they seemed to best balance out the red, green and blue channels.

Then I created a hue/saturation adjustment layer and selected the red channel, changing the lightness to -77 and saturation to +19.

And finally, I created a curves adjustment layer, and had the program do an "auto" adjust.

Contrast the above with what the computer does:

May I ask how you got the image with the Bayer mosaic?

Yes, I used dcraw to output the undemosaiced image.

You'll need to do some modification to extract a color version, though dcraw natively outputs a greyscale version:

Search for pre_interpolate();

and insert after that line.

goto thumbnail;

You also need to comment out the lines involving:
if (multi_out)
sprintf (ofname+strlen(ofname), "_%0*d",
snprintf(0,0,"%d",is_raw-1), shot_select);


Dave Coffin the author of dcraw suggests the following reference for a compiler, run in a CMD windows on XP:

"You need to download the appropriate ZIP files from
http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/ , unpack them all into C:\DJGPP,
and do:

gcc -o dcraw.exe -O4 dcraw.c -lm -DNO_JPEG -DNO_LCMS "
Be sure to use the Zip Picker.

Thank you. I did not know there was a gcc for Windows. My workstation is running Linux as Dom0 anyways, so I will definitely give this a try. Looks really interesting.