Comment by hankbond
1 day ago
Very neat. I have a love-hate relationship with a unique type of digital sensor called the Foveon X3, which needs a particular (very sluggish and limited capability) software made by Sigma to convert the RAWs. Recently I have been using AI to create a converter that processes the RAWs in a similar fashion with some improvements.
This is one of those cases where its a means-to-an-end (I just want to take more photos without being bogged down) and less of a project for me to learn how to reverse-engineer and design signal processing pipelines. I am very grateful for what recent models are enabling me to do.
Have you tried a Foveon sensor camera for film scanning? I was wondering about it recently and how it would perform - the easily removable IR filter and different way the sensor works could be really interesting.
Everyone has a love/hate relationship with Foveon, that's the beauty of the sensor isn't it ? Would you mind sharing your project ? That's awesome. Have you been able to compare crispness of files ? Dng compatibility from latest cameras, although it results in huge files, was pretty useful but files were not as sharp as native X3F developed in Sigma Photo Pro.
Remind us what the Foveon sensor's quirk was? Something in the subpixel layout as I recall. A non-bayer pattern since abandoned and largely unsupported, yet effective somehow. But maybe I'm imagining this.
Foveon sensor is composed of three Red/blue/green layers, so each pixels know exactly its color, while the Bayer sensor used by other manufacturers is composed of pixels that are either red, blue or green, and that implies some reading out of its color and its neighbour's one... and some glitches (typically moire or purple fringes). In order to reduce those, a Low-pass filter that blurs the picture a little bit is added on top of the sensor. Therefore, foveon pictures are way sharper, with true colors. This is the theory for colors... in fact it's a very hard to tame sensor and results can be very random. Plus the cameras are very slow because they have to process 3x more information. Sigma being a very very small company versus the other big guys, their R&D is limited. Still, it's a very nice camera to use for geeks who takes time to understand it. You hate it or love it. No in-between.
What improvements have you made? Processing RAW sluggishness was always an issue from de-Bayering. Before RAW, my hell was DPX image sequences. This was pre-SSD, so I/O was painful opening/closing individual frames in realtime. The best improvement of processing RAW I've experienced was NVMe SSDs.