I clarified in an earlier response on this point that my Mac only shows a generic icon for a .ARW file when I look at the folder contents in column view, whereas it displays a tiny thumbnail for the .JPG files. However, if I select the .ARW file the next column does indeed show a preview of the image.

Thanks for your endorsement of this thread; and thanks also to a few others who have commented that it has been somewhat illuminating.

Regarding things like QM and Feynman, I read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and found it… well, interesting! So I next read A Briefer History of Time hoping it might make some of the concepts easier to understand, and I found it… well, interestinger!!! (Yes, I love making up words.) At that point I realized that difficult concepts probably need longer and more detailed explanations to be understood, and attempts to condense them into simplified analogies may not always work.

This thread has generated some interesting responses that go to various depths of detail of how digital photography works. It is up to the readers to decide how deep they want to go, but hopefully some will have an "Aha, so that's how it works" moment that is satisfying.

Hmmm… From Wikipedia:

"The maximum capacity of each pixel in a charge-coupled device image sensor, known as the well depth, is typically given in units of electrons, commonly around 10^5 e– per pixel."

Methinks electrons might be countable.

Yeah, it would be difficult to get a fraction of an electron, so at that level I guess the information is digital, as is any numerical representation of a quantity even if fractional values are permitted (based on scaling). At some point things tend to become discrete, I guess.

Not quite; the article states photons are converted into photo-electrons.

The further I got in university physics the more it became applied mathematics. Concepts no longer had any touchy-feely aspects to them the way Newtonian classical mechanics did. My hero was a very bright physics professor who did a lot of work in electronics and audio (in fact, worked with LucasFilms ILM) and said that using quantum mechanics you could prove that electrons are the size of basketballs, and they are green!!! I guess he, too, had trouble grasping such abstractions. So I agree that mathematical constructs can be used to describe behaviors of systems, but in the end it has to translate into something more meaningful than equations. Thankfully, out of RAW and all the computing power and algorithms that drive the number crunching we get an image on the screen that reminds us of what we were trying to photograph.

OMG UR good!

To rmalarz and Apaflo… on light hitting film grains being digital (hit or not hit) or analog (size, location, proximity to others):

"Wait, stop, you're both right… it's 2 mints in one!"

But damned if I can remember the name of the candy/breath mint being advertised!!!

I think you are correct about fear mongering, but lots of people advocate waiting until at least the first update to new software to get rid of the first wave of bugs. My Mac has been working very well and I can live with seeing an icon in place of a thumbnail for RAW.

Note: when I said I can't see a thumbnail of the RAW I was referring to the display of the files in a folder. If I click on a file and I am in column view I will see a preview image of the RAW file in the next column. So this is not really a big deal. I only mentioned it previously to highlight that extraction of information from a RAW file is dependent on software capabilities.

I can picture exactly what you are saying. Well put, and carry on if that works for you. ;)

Yes, nasty stuff that has killed a lot of people. I assume you heard that an Australian MP tried to bring in legislation to ban it? (Not sure if that was true; must check on Snopes someday.)

I shoot Sony and my RAW file extensions are .ARW and they don't show up as a thumbnail preview but just as in icon. Other Apple software such as Preview and iPhoto can open the RAW file without problem.

Perhaps it is because I am still using OS 10.7.5 Lion. I have been hesitant to upgrade to El Capitan because of what I have read on UHH and elsewhere. And Apple will not let me upgrade to any of the interim OS versions anymore.

But if we are also learning, even just a bit, in the process then we are ALL winners.

I have to say that as the OP I have enjoyed this thread and learned a few things. And that's what it's all about.

Check… and Mate. But who's the winner?

Even more to the point, the photo sites are analog but the voltage on each site is digitized through an analog-to-digital converter. Then, because of the discrete array of pixels one might say the image is digitized (or pixelated) into discrete quantities over the plane of the sensor, thus perhaps double-digitalized (is that even a word???). Whew!!!