Image in AIWINP

I think AIP4WIN inserts divisions between the Bayer Array "pixels" on your camera. Richard Berry, the author of AIP4WIN, often posts stuff to our forums, perhaps he could elaborate?

Hi Hubert!The way AIP4WIN will display your raw pictures differs considerably from what you'll see in camera vendor software made for every-day shots. Actually there are several things to note:1) RAW image import and White balance: The "true raw image" that is produced by your camera is the more or less unprocessed recording of brightness for every single sensor on your CCD or CMOS chip in your camera. No compression, no interpolation, no nothing. The RAW file created containing this raw image also records the whitebalance settings you have configured in your camara menu at the time of the exposure, but those settings are not (!) applied to the image yet. That's why you can change the whitebalance (and many other settings) afterwards when processing (or "developing") that raw image in your camara vendor's software. That software will default to using the exposure-time whitebalance (and other settings) recorded in the raw image file. AIP4WIN has a similar option to "use the camera's white balance" when importing the image. Your camera vendor's software will also apply all the other recorded settings like brightness correction, contrast enhancement, noise reduction and whatnot to the raw image when loading it, but AIP4WIN will not do that because usually you want to start with an unprocessed RAW image and use AIP4WINs filters and processing steps instead of the camera's. For photometry, this is a must. All those "pretty picture" enhancement features are interfering with a good measurement.2) Hot pixel and other sensor defect removalThe camera vendor's software will automatically deal with defects of some pixels, AIP4Win presents the true raw image, complete with pixel defects. A correction is achieved by sbstracting darkframes in AIP4WIN. 3) Display mode: white and black pointsAIP4WIN displays images with a customizable setting for white and black point: You can choose the brightness levels that should be displayed as "Black" and "White" respectively. For a 12 bit sensor used in most DSLRs, a black point of 0 and a white point of 4095 will give a "natural" brightness display (see the little floating dialog with the graph in it). These settings do NOT change the image, they just change the way an image is displayed on your PC's screen. Sometimes AIP4WIN will use a default of 0...65535 (for 16 bit CCD sensors), so this could be the problem when your images appear all black. If the images appear very noisy, set those black and white points to 0..4095. Hope this helps,CUHeinz