Digital Photography: Making Art in Milliseconds

Digital cameras, like the one in this photo booth, rely on built-in computers to capture and develop images instantaneously. Learn more about the process with Groupon’s guide to digital photography.

With traditional film, light enters the lens and registers on millions of microscopic silver halide crystals, forming a latent image that can later be developed through a chemical reaction. Digital cameras work in much the same way, carrying out the complex process—from exposure to development—in only fractions of a second. Instead of hitting a frame of film, the light hits an image sensor made up of millions of photosensitive diodes. Each diode corresponds to a pixel, the tiny colored dots that make up a digital image. The diodes do not register color, however—instead, the sensor simply records the brightness of the light hitting each pixel, along with its electrical charge. The charges for each pixel are recorded and converted into digital data, or bytes—a series of ones and zeroes. This data represents the location and brightness for each pixel in the picture, instantly forming a black and white reproduction of the image. To develop the color, the sensor computes the color of each pixel by applying red, green, and blue filters based on information from the surrounding pixels—a process known as interpolation. Once interpolated, the image shows up as a full-color, full-resolution digital image ready to be printed, edited, or e-mailed to an old friend to prove you still exist—all in the matter of a few milliseconds.