Systems and methods for reorganizing raw image data captured by a camera for improved image processing are disclosed. The method generally includes separately compressing each color component, e.g., RGB, of raw grayscale image data to generate a reorganized grayscale data output file by a first processor, and performing color decoding to generate a color image output by a second processor. The raw grayscale image data may be that of an image of a target captured by a digital camera in an image capturing system. The second processor is separate from the first processor that records the raw grayscale image data of the image captured and may be physically external to the camera. The raw grayscale image data may be a 2N.times.2N array and the reorganized grayscale data output includes 4 N.times.N color-specific arrays where N is a factor of 8.