V1.02
Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
Page 57
and the lighting indoors tends to be dim to start with.
Indeed, overall, the blue channel on the D300 tends to be
the noisiest (at least until the camera’s noise reduction
circuitry comes into play), and this problem is
compounded in incandescent light because there is so
little energy in the blue wavelengths available to be
captured by the sensor.
• Red to Black and Blue to Black transitions compromise
detail
. Black is defined as the absence of light in all three
channels (R, G, and B). Thus, when you have a pure red
area adjacent to a pure black area, the Bayer pattern gets
in the way (no value is being reported by the G and B
photosites, thus only one in four photosites is providing
useful information that can be translated into image
detail). Red to Blue transitions can also exhibit a similar
problem, though usually not as visually intrusive as the
Red to Black or Blue to Black ones.
Shooting a scene with only red and black renders three quarters of
the photosites inactive, as only the red photosites are providing
measurable light values. Compare this matrix to the previous one
and you’ll see that the effective resolution has decreased (I’ve
made the patterns the same size).
• Moiré patterns may appear
. When the frequency of image
detail changes at or near the pitch of the photosites
(imagine a photo of the screen on a door where the line
intersections of the screen hit almost, but not exactly on
the photosites), an artifact of interpolation is often a
