You may not realize it, but your digital camera doesn’t give you every pixel that it records.

In most cases this is because the manufacturer masks off pixels at the very edges of the frame. This is done for a couple of technical reasons.

1. Many of the image processing algorithms (de-mosaicing, noise reduction, sharpening) that camera firmware (or raw conversion software) apply to raw
sensor data are not “point operations”, but are instead “neighborhood operations”. When computing the output value of a given pixel, the algorithm needs to know not only the input value of that pixel, but also the input values of the pixels in the local neighborhood. The pixels at the very edges of the recorded image don’t have a complete local neighborhood, so the algorithms need make some guess as to their value, which means that output results for these edge pixels will be not quite as accurate as the pixels a few pixels away from the edges. By trimming away these edge pixels, the camera manufacturers guarantee that all the output pixels are of maximum quality.

2. Sometimes image sensors don’t have aspect ratios that exactly match the standard aspect ratios (3:2, 4:3, 16:9, etc.). In these cases, there are often different numbers of horizontal and vertical pixels hidden, to cause the final output image to have an exact aspect ratio. When some users print digital camera images, they often don’t bother to crop them, so having the camera output images with standard aspect ratios that exactly match standard paper dimensions is an advantage.

Occasionally, your framing of a shot may be such that you need those hidden pixels. What to do?

Also, there are cameras appearing, such as the Panasonic LX1, and its sister camera the Leica D-Lux 2, which have 16:9 format sensors, but which can also be set to shoot 4:3 or 3:2 aspect ratio pictures. The camera actually records the sensor’s full area regardless of how the camera’s selector switch was set. But if you decide that you’d rather have the full width frame there’s no way to recover those missing pixels. Or is there?

Thomas Knoll, Chris Sanderson and Michael Reichmann
Ride an Escalator with a Mirrored Ceiling in Hong Kong
October, 2005

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There is Now

Solving a problem that few people knew even existed, Thomas Knoll, one of the original authors of Photoshop, and the creator of Adobe’s Camera Raw, has written a free utility program which recovers all of the pixels that any supported digital camera records, whether it’s hidden edges or intentionally cropped formats.

Called DNG Recover Edges, this small utility is available for both Windows PCs and Macs. All cameras supported by Camera Raw are supported by DNG Recover Edges. This utility is available exclusively here, courtesy of Thomas Knoll and The Luminous Landscape. Please note that this application is unsupported, and is not an Adobe product.

Simply download either the Windows or Mac version by clicking here and then selecting the file that you want in your browser.

Once the program is installed all you need to do is to drag one or more DNG files onto its Icon. Any hidden edges will be recovered and resaved back to its original DNG file. Note that JPG files can not be handled, and any RAW file will first need to be converted to DNG format within Camera Raw, Adobe DNG Converter, or some other DNG compatible conversion program.

Thanks Thomas!