So Much Software in Digital Cameras!

I recently compared my Nikon camera to the camera in my Pixel phone. (See Comparing Nikon and Pixel Cameras.) In trying to respond to a comment on that post, I realized that there is so much software in any modern digital camera that I needed to write a whole blog post about it, not just a comment reply. For this post, I am going to talk about my Nikon Z 5 but it is pretty typical of any digital camera.

In the good ol’ days, a camera was simple. There was a lens in the front. The lens had a variable aperture, allowing you to control how much light got through it. The size of the aperture (the opening) is measured in F-stops. If you peer into a lens, you will see something like this.

In addition to the aperture, lenses have variable focus, allowing you to make things sharp that are either close to the camera or far away or somewhere in between.

Behind the lens, inside the camera, was a shutter. It was usually a pair of sliding doors which would uncover and then recover the film. The first door would slide open. The camera would wait the specified amount of time, and then the second door would slide shut. If the amount of time was short enough, the second door would start to close before the first door was fully open.

Shutter speeds are measured in fractions of a second, typically something like 1/60 second or 1/125. Why? Because the millisecond had not yet been invented. ? These days, we could rename 1/60 sec. to 17 msec. and 1/125 sec. to 8 msec. Higher shutter speeds, like 1/2000 sec. could become microseconds, so 1/2000 sec. would become 500 µsec. Hmmm, maybe we should just stick with fractions of seconds.

Here is a cool video showing the action.

And that was pretty much all there was to a camera. You could change how the pictures looked by changing the kind of film that you put into the camera (think black & white film vs. color film but there were dozens of kinds of film, each with slightly varying characteristics).

Fast forward to the 21st century.

Mechanically, cameras and lenses are still pretty similar. Lenses have variable apertures and variable focus. Cameras still have shutters. Behind the shutter is an image sensor instead of film but the idea is the same. Light hits the sensor and that starts the process of creating or storing the image.

Nikon Digital Cameras

However, light hitting the sensor is just the barest beginning of the process for a modern camera. Software comes to bear and has an immense effect on the image, arguably more than the physical lens and shutter. The Nikon Z 5 has these settings in its menu.

Image Quality

Selects the file format (JPEG or Nikon’s raw format, NEF) and quality (fine, normal, or basic).

Image Size

Select from 12 sizes, varying from 2000×2000 pixels to 6016×4016 pixels. Bigger images have more detail but take up more space on the camera’s memory card on and your computer.

ISO Sensitivity

Choose a value from ISO 100 to ISO 51200. Lower numbers are less sensitive to light but produce higher quality images. As the ISO sensitive gets turned up, the quality of the image goes down. “ISO” is shorthand for ISO 5800:2001 for film and ISO 12232:2019 for digital still-cameras. You can read a lot more about it on Wikipedia.

White Balance

Control how the camera renders color so that things look right, regardless of the type of light. Choose from Auto, Natural Light Auto, Direct Sunlight, Cloudy, Shade, Incandescent, and Fluorescent. There are additional tweaks in the White Balance menu if you want to get really detailed about it (and sometimes I do).

Picture Control

This is a grab-bag menu item giving you a shortcut to several individual settings. Choose from Auto, Standard, Neutral, Vivid, Monochrome, Portrait, and Landscape. Within each of those you can adjust Quick Sharp[ening], Contrast, Brightness, and Saturation. Within Quick Sharp, you can adjust Sharpening, Mid-range sharpening, and Clarity.

Active D-Lighting

Control how well the camera captures details in both bright and dark parts of the image. Choose between Auto, Extra High, High, Normal, Low, and Off. Nikon describes it this way: Preserve details in highlights and shadows, creating pictures with natural contrast. Use for high-contrast scenes, for example when photographing brightly-lit outdoor scenery through a door or window or taking pictures of shaded subjects on a sunny day. See below for an example.

High ISO NR

Up above, I wrote that as the ISO sensitive gets turned up, the quality of the image goes down. This tries to compensate for the loss of quality. Choose between High, Normal, Low, and Off.

HDR (High Dynamic Range)

Our eyes+brains are remarkably adept at seeing the world, even when there are bright bright things in the sky and deeply dark shadowed areas. Cameras do not do anywhere near as well. HDR photography tries to emulate our eyes+brains either by taking multiple photos (one exposed for the bright sky and another exposed for the shadows) and then combining them, or by using a lot of software on a single photo. Choose between On (series), On (single photo), and Off. If you select On (series) then you can also set the Exposure differential between the images and the Smoothing, which is how the boundaries between the images are handled. See below for an example.

I know that that was a lot of words so here are a couple of illustrations from the owners’ manual for the Nikon Z 5.

Google Pixel Phone Cameras

If you consider the Google Pixel 7 Pro, it actually has three cameras, one of which takes 50 megapixel images. In many situations, it magically uses software to combine images from two of the cameras. It always uses software to downsample the 50 megapixel images, usually to 12.5 megapixel images.

Google published a nice article about the processing in Pixel 6’s camera combines hardware, software and ML.

There are a very small number of menu choices in the Google Camera app but none which correspond directly with Nikon’s choices.

With all of this software involved, you can see why it is so difficult to objectively compare two cameras by two different manufacturers.