The Art and Science of Digital Compositing, 2nd Edition

Chapter Three. The Digital Representation of Visual Information

Digital compositing is, ultimately, about working with images. Before we can effectively discuss any of the basic tools of compositing, therefore, we need to build up a bit of background knowledge and vocabulary concerning how images are dealt with in the digital medium we are using. This is a large topic (and the chapter length reflects this!) but a core understanding of these fundamental concepts will make everything that follows much clearer.

For the topic of digital compositing, an obvious issue is how the digital image data is stored and represented. Although this topic could conceivably be extended to include everything from binary data coding to disk formatting, we try to present ...