Your Camera Is Colorblind Here's How It Sees Color

Your camera sensor cannot see color at all. Yet every photo comes out in full color.

So how does a colorblind sensor produce the reds, greens and blues you see on screen?

Engineers lay a microscopic grid of colored filters over the sensor, called a Bayer filter. Each tiny well gets capped with one color: red, green or blue. So every pixel records just one color of light. Then software performs a step called demosaicing. It looks at the colors captured by the neighboring pixels and intelligently guesses the two colors each pixel is missing. Do that across millions of pixels and a full-color image appears, built almost entirely from educated guesses.

Look closer at the pattern and half of all the filters are green, with only a quarter red and a quarter blue. Why? Because your eyes are far more sensitive to green, so the sensor copies your own vision.

Follow The Explainer Vault — because everything has an explanation.