Appendix C

Further Reading

Sources by pipeline stage — split into 'safe to reimplement' and 'read for understanding only'.

Sources, by pipeline stage. Two ground rules carried over from the chapters. First, everything listed under a stage is published, citable work — safe to study and, where it is an algorithm, safe to reimplement; the final section collects what is not, and why the distinction matters to anyone shipping code. Second, the list is deliberately short: each entry is here because a chapter leaned on it or points straight at it, not to survey a field.

The sensor and noise (Chapter 2)

White balance and color constancy (Chapter 3)

Demosaicing (Chapter 4)

Color (Chapter 5)

The lens (Chapter 6)

Tone (Chapter 7)

Detail and noise reduction (Chapter 8)

Encoding (Chapter 9)

Whole pipelines, in source code (Chapter 10)

The wider field

Proprietary — read for understanding only

The boundary the whole book has walked: published algorithms are safe ground, and shipping products are not, however visible their behavior. Camera manufacturers’ in-camera processing — picture styles, noise reduction, their demosaicing variants — is trade secret and, in places, patented; the book’s results differ from any camera’s rendering by design, not by failure. Adobe’s highlight reconstruction, profiles and enhancement features are products, not papers; where the DNG specification documents an interface, that interface is fair game, and where behavior is only observable, it is only observable. Commercial derivatives and accelerations of published algorithms (BM3D’s, notably) can be encumbered even where the original is open — reimplement from the paper, not from a product. And modern royalty-encumbered codecs (HEVC/HEIC among them) sit on active patent pools: formats to read about, not to reimplement for fun. None of this is a complaint; it is a map of where the fences are, and ten chapters have shown how much country lies inside them.