How Film (And Even Digital) Works

Do you remember Prof. Leeper talking about animating by scratching layers off of film stock, how there would be various colors layered on top of each other? This is how that works. You may be surprised to learn that this principle still applies to digital photography.

I'm assuming that most of you are aware of the three color channels; red, blue, and green or "RBG." With these three color channels we're able to make entire pictures. It used to be everything was black and white. Then movie studios started experimenting with adding the reds and the blues in certain segments of silent movies. It was an expensive and troublesome process, but that didn't stop them from trying. Eventually, green was added and the process refined. When you see a camera that has 3 CCD written on it, that means that it has the red, blue, and green sensors. Okay, enough of the history lesson.

Red, blue, and green are the sensors used, HOWEVER, those are not the only color channels. If you begin scratching away at the film you find that there are actually 6 colors; red, blue, green, yellow, magenta, and cyan.















All of this is layered on top of a black and white base. But even this base can be broken down into three parts; blacks, whites, and neutrals.








What's more interesting is that these level can be broken down into even more levels. I can get finer and finer amount of the blacks, whites, and neutrals until there are none of each left. I'm not crazy enough to do that, but it's cool that I could.

When these are all layered together you get a full picture.



I wonder what he's talking about. "So he's walking down the street, and he has the sandwich in one hand..."