Jim, Excellent slide presentation on the intricacies of digital capture technology explained in a somewhat easy to understand layout for photographers to grasp. Got lost on the graphs and math.
I'm sorry that it was confusing. It was a challenge for me to fit what I wanted into 45 minutes, and maybe I should have left some things out. The linear algebra (mostly matrix multiplication) was included so that people who are familiar with the techniques could understand exactly the operations. For everybody else, the details can be safely ignored. It's not so easy with the logarithms; they have been part of discussions of photographic exposure and sensitometry since Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield invented the photographic characteristic curves, aka H&D curves, aka D-logE curves. The graphs are a pretty condensed way at looking at the characteristics of individual cameras, and are really important only in how they show that there is an empirical way to decide when to stop turning up the ISO.
Did you create this just for techno FYI or are there plans for developing a better Raw converter by you engineer types?
The idea behind the first CPA raw processing workshop came from Nick Wheeler, and it was something like: raw processing tools are becoming more and more opaque, and (some) photographers do better work if they understand their tools well, so why not have a workshop that brings together the constructors of the tools and the users of the tools with the idea that the users can learn about how the tools work and the constructors can learn what users want?
The first workshop was a success, and the next idea was to do something similar in the Silicon Valley. Because of the location of the workshop, we thought that the average level of mathematical and scientific sophistication of the attendees would be high, which is why I didn't pull too many punches when it came to explaining what goes on inside a digital camera. If I went overboard, I'm sorry.
Jim