ABSTRACT
Both film and digital image capture share many common characteristics. Both record light reflections received at the image plane onto a light-sensitive medium, with the objective of reproduction at some later stage. While the eventual output can appear very similar, the routes to achieve it are technologically quite different. The silver halide technology of traditional photography produces an analogue, continuous tone image where quality is limited by the grain size of the individual halide crystals. Digital images, by comparison, are electronically created, stepped-tone images based on the binary digital system where ‘0’ is black and ‘1’ is white, in its simplest form. An image is recorded as a framework of millions of ‘pixels’: the smallest distinct units, or picture elements, of a digital image that are encoded with the varying intensities of the colours red, green and blue that make up the image.
